by John Domini
“But the boy has a good point, don’t you know. So far as the history’s concerned, I admire his thinking.”
Barbara gave her head another ambiguous shake. She might’ve had no answer for the Father, just now, no more than for her two oldest that night at dinner, but she knew the person in her house who came closest to rich and powerful. She’d kept up her scrutiny of the American Boss. She’d made sure to let Jay know what she thought of his act out at the Center—”act” was just the word. She’d chosen a time to tell him when the news packed a wallop, just after they’d finished their latest roughhouse. She and the Jaybird had shared kisses a lot hotter than JJ’s and Romy’s, and afterwards, as her climax cooled, Barbara had realized: now was the time. Their skin and hormones could confuse them; she had to clarify. She’d removed his hand from her breast and declared she didn’t trust him. She believed he was some kind of liar, she’d said, a bad person.
“Which leaves me with no choice,” she concluded. “It’s got to be divorce, starting as soon as Aurora gets here.”
Actually, this conversation had taken place the night before. Hardly fifteen hours before Barbara’s mid-siesta visit with the priest, she’d left her Jaybird grumbling and rubbing his face.
“I got to point out,” the husband had said, “we don’t even know when Mom’s going to arrive. She’ll just drop in without warning like always.”
“A man on her arm, too. That’s Aurora.”
“Maybe, maybe. But think about this, hey. You’re going to let my mother take over the kids? My mother who you’ve never trusted?”
“What are you saying, take over the kids? Aurora’s only going to do the kind of thing she’s done before. Short-term care.”
“Jesus, Owl. You’ve got it all worked out.”
“Well, would you be available? Won’t Kahlberg need you on the job?”
“Hey, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m—I mean, it’s for the family. Jesus, Barbara! You want to leave just when things get tough?”
“So you admit you’re doing something for Kahlberg?”
Jay had exhaled slowly and fingered her hipline. But the private gesture didn’t work; they were already naked.
“Jay, you say you’re doing it for the family. But don’t you see, when you’re hooked up with a man like that you’re bound to put the family in harm’s way?”
The husband had taken his hands off her and returned to his fallback argument. “Hey, I’m doing a lot of good.” He’d brought up his visit to the hunger strikers, “Down there with the strikers, I mean, there was your priest there. Your priest, Barb.” But Barbara was tired of hearing about it, the Jaybird as angel of mercy. Not only had the story dragged on throughout kids’ time and dinnertime, that evening, but also the visit had been on the news and then, the following day inside the NATO caravan, the liaison officer had taken time to buff up the husband’s saintliness further.
Through it all, the wife couldn’t help but see her husband’s dell’Ovo visit as a deliberate counterpoint to her own earlier visit out to the Refugee Center. After the Refugee Center, the struggle in the Jaybird’s heart had needed to breach the surface in the same way, with a big whoop-de-doo. He’d needed to send his wife a message by way of the Church and the TV In the process Jay again proved that his spiffy new friend, the officer in charge of PR, had taught him something. The care unit for the hunger strikers had been set up as maximum security, but the Jaybird had wangled the clearance for a pair of camera crews. The Capo Americano had even brought mail for the strikers, and in one case a couple of handicrafts from a tribesman back at the center.
“Your priest,” he’d repeated finally, last night as he’d climbed back into bed. “The old man, he was there. You think he’s in on Silky’s scam too?”
“Jay, what kind of a question is that? Is that going to get us anywhere?”
“Get us anywhere,” Jay said.
“Jaybird, there’s got to be something going on. Just this place—how could the UN afford a place in the Vomero?”
“Hey. You think I ever in a million years expected something like this?” With the heel of his hand he’d massaged his forehead. “Accommodations like this?”
As Barbara watched, her sympathies had unclenched within her. She’d suffered for the man again, as she had on and off since she’d first become the apostle knocked from her horse, blasted by her vision of a new and marriage-free heaven and earth. Some of her husband’s motives for visiting the downtown castle, after all, had been genuine. Some part of the Jaybird, separate from NATO influence, had nurtured a good-faith wish to turn the Africans in dell’Ovo away from their slow suicide.
If only he’d gone down there alone, as Cesare did, without TV or NATO. If only it hadn’t looked, as he pawed at his big head, as if he were trying to hide his eyes.
Jay didn’t much snore, last night no more than any other during the week, and so after he dropped off Barbara she could hear, two floors below their balcony, the NATO guardsmen practicing their English. Excuse me please, please could you tell me where to find the cathedral of this city? In Europe too the foot soldiers tended to be the boys without better options, the working poor. The mother also enjoyed the grind and bleat of the traffic beneath these Vomero heights, a hundred thousand machines probing the alleys or shaving the Bay, a vast ecosystem crackling with tenor horns and basso transmissions, the turbulence widening her perspective until Barbara would shed the anxiety that had mounted during the day, and come to understand that she wasn’t so confused. She wasn’t a mad housewife. She was only exercising a quality control, like the experts that even now might be running a forth or fifth scan on her new I.D. Sooner or later Jay or his liaison would expose their dirty dealings, and she would have the glaring betrayal she needed in order to dump the man. The certainty of it buoyed her up, and she spun slowly on a chuckling surface tension, all foreign voices and invisible travelers. As she drifted towards sleep, Barbara even felt comfortable about the puppy love that had sprung up between her oldest boy and gypsy Romy.
If the girl were bad for the family, then she would be good for the liaison officer. She’d strengthen Silky’s manipulations, somehow, and the Lieutenant Major would act accordingly. He’d treat the doll-face as an ally. But so far as Barbara could see, Kahlberg never missed an opportunity to attack the girl.
“Romy,” he would say, sneering, “Romy, or whatever she’s calling herself now.”
He remained blunt and nasty about how she’d made a living before the quake. “That girl didn’t care if you were American, Italian, Somali, whatever. All she cared about was what was in your wallet.”
On top of that, whenever the liaison had some more shit in his pocket to throw, he made sure that he and the mother were alone. He didn’t want any of the kids to butt in, to undermine his slander, because of course his filthy talk was all about control. About maintaining his Svengali hand. The Lieutenant Major was trying to forge a secret bond with the person he took to be the second most powerful on the scene. But then too, the way Silky whispered, he had to be worried about the gypsy herself, her calling his bluff somehow. The man was the closest Barb had come to James Bond, but he was afraid of a former wheelchair case.
Anyway, no matter how dirty the brush with which the NATO man tried to tar the girl, in one respect she remained spotless. A few hours after her healing, in the hospital closest to the Refugee Center, dottore DiPio had put Romy through a battery of tests. He’d checked everything from her muscle responses to her blood, and he’d checked her again in his downtown clinic the following evening (the following morning, of course, the girl had had a conflicting appointment, a surprise meeting with the Flying Lulucitas). The gypsy had come through every exam as clean as a whistle. Was she merely lucky, or had she been more careful than the NATO liaison would like to have everyone believe? Had she been, perhaps, no whore to begin with? DiPio’s tests didn’t reveal anything conclusive about the young woman’s history, and Romy herself wasn’t saying. For all Barba
ra knew, the family’s new companion might’ve had all her sins washed clean at once, as soon as Mr. Paul had touched her.
Nevertheless the mother didn’t believe Romy had lived a life of purity. In the years before the gypsy had spent two and a half days trapped beneath a collapsed apartment building, out on the city’s periferia, she must’ve made her living as a shady operator of one kind or another. And it didn’t help, so far as Barbara’s suspicions were concerned, that Romy bore an eerie resemblance to the bad girls of her un-gentrified childhood Brooklyn. If the estranged wife had any image for the toughness she wanted to achieve, she’d picked it up from the skanks in Carroll Gardens. The dropouts from Sacred Heart. The sluts always had a mongrel quality, as if their clothes were so skimpy because they fell between types, as if they needed all that makeup to pull the eyes and mouth into their assigned places. Romy’s eyes still seemed like something off the far Asian steppes, and her complexion remained unfiltered honey, and this much together suggested Baghdad or Tel Aviv. But her sharp brow and nose, her tight and uplifted shape, these suggested London or St. Tropez. Granted, the gypsy’s legs would grow stubby in another fifteen or twenty years. They weren’t so shapely just now, either, still recovering bulk and muscle. But at Romy’s age—perhaps within a year of John Junior’s age—she turned everything to teasy combinations. Even in this skin-full corner of Italy, among the low-rise Capris and the billboards full of breasts, she had men gazing sidelong and puckering in thought.
But it wasn’t just the gypsy’s looks that made Barbara believe she used to be a criminal. It wasn’t anything Silky Kahlberg had to say either. The evidence that mattered was the way that, no matter where the family’s excursions took them, Romy was always waiting when they arrived. She was there before they set up the Big Top, and she did it her first day out of the chair.
That morning Kahlberg had begun trying to create the illusion that Barbara’s family was no different from the other Americans in Italy. They were bonding amid the ruins, he’d wanted them to think, just like everyone else. And by the end of the trip the Lulucitas had also attracted the usual cluster of supplicants, with their martyrs and rosaries. But the gypsy had been there waiting for them. She’d tuned into a different information system, side of the mouth.
Back on the day she was healed, the girl had pretty much dropped off Barbara’s radar once everyone got to the hospital. Rather the mother had paid attention to Paul, on whom DiPio of course ran the same tests as he did on Romy, plus a couple more. As the stunned afternoon wore on into evening, too, the doctor more than once pulled Jay and Barbara aside with beard-scratching requests “not to do nothing all of a suddenly.” He clutched his neckwear and pleaded with her “to stay in this place where the child demonstrates this power, and where we have him under observation from the first.” Meanwhile the boy was passing all his tests and looking fresh. He caught a cat-nap during the ride from the camp. He suffered no crying episodes, either, not even when Jay and Barb ducked into a storage room for a quick hissy fit. Mother and father worked through a bout of mutual recriminations, their words barely emerging from the backs of their throats, and then they’d stepped out from the closet to confront a blasé boy in re-tucked black and white. Mr. Paul was unfazed. What was the big deal, if he’d become a child saint? He knew the drill by now, the role was a Mediterranean classic anyway, and it hadn’t escaped his notice that the fast-rising Maddalena had made another video. He knew about the crowds, the competing packs of TV units and miracle-seekers, first outside the hospital and later in the Vomero. He didn’t see what Mama was so worried about, keeping a hand on his head—her fingers actually threaded through his hair—till they were back inside the apartment. He didn’t see why she had to keep his big brothers breathing down his neck, one at each shoulder.
No, Barbara hadn’t given the gypsy a second glance, that afternoon at the hospital. Nor Kahlberg either; she’d tuned the officer out as he began to make arrangements for the morning. He started right in working the cell phone, and he did quite a job, the mother had to admit. Apparently the Lieutenant Major had pull with the Consulate. Between sunset and breakfast he got his entire North American et cetera to put pressure on the editors and producers of the local and national news, reining in the media a bit, allowing the family some recovery space in the coming days. Barbara didn’t want to think about the quid pro quo. Rather she pictured Kahlberg’s arrangements as a wrestling match between titans. The aging but powerful Captain Red White & Blue took down, with effort, the young but dangerous Mass Communication, Master of Disaster. She pictured it as a comics panel, a fairy tale—the sort of thing she’d read to Paul that very night, once she got him into bed. She sat down beside the boy with the anthology on her lap, the big book of fairy tales she’d brought from Bridgeport. She’d known he’d want to hear them sometime, her Mr. Paul, her fairy child.
The mother could still play Mother Goose. That night she picked a favorite from a land far away, the story of the Irish Queen Bab.
As for the Gypsy Queen, the dark young lovely restored to her feet, who could say when John Junior had noticed her? Perhaps it had happened up in the Center’s chapel, in the sweltering purple aftermath of the riot. His Michelangelo lips had taken on a fresh shape, as he looked the girl over. Then the next morning Kahlberg had taken the family far away. They’d gone out to Capua, due north.
The liaison showed shrewdness, typical, in his choice for their first daytrip. They began at the beginning, on a site where Etruscan war parties had taken over an earlier settlement still, Neolithic. Though Chris nitpicked about the choice. That was another shred in the moil of this past near-week; the officer and the fifteen-year-old couldn’t get onto the highway without a disagreement. On this first day following the second healing, Silky pointed out the castle at the highest point in the Vomero, Castel Sant’Elmo. Next thing he knew, he was in an argument over something called “St. Elmo’s fire.” Chris insisted that the stuff wasn’t actually fire and Elmo wasn’t the saint’s real name.
“Now son,” the Lieutenant Major said, “I don’t know as there’s any place in Naples that has what you’d call its real name.”
Yeah, okay. But Chris went on to claim that around here, recorded history didn’t begin out at Capua, in the foothills of the Appenines. Rather things had started along the coast, at Cumae. There the Greeks had set up their first temples and shops.
“Mn,” the liaison replied, “you know a hundred years before that, the Greeks were out on the islands.”
“Sure, the islands,” Chris said. “The Sirens.”
But what Barbara wanted to hear about, once the family reached their destination, was the time-blackened artifact known as arrangiarsi, making arrangements—a business less than legal and yet embedded all over greater Naples. Anyone who stuck a hand under the table, in this city, could always find another one down there. There was always somebody who’d read the day’s Duty Roster, willing to swap a secret for one of the prettier banknotes. How else could Romy have wound up here beneath the Capua Duomo? How except by Camorra-dot-com?
She lounged against a church pillar that had gone up well before Christ was a carpenter, a column left over from an Etruscan temple that had first occupied this ground. Sunlight glinted off her gypsy array, the bracelets of tarnished silver and sparkle-dusted plastic, and the sequins sewn into her halter top. The outfit revealed so much olive-dark midriff that at first Barbara thought, with relief, the priests wouldn’t let Romy in the church. But then as soon as Kahlberg had finished his transactions over the documents and satchels, John Junior had jumped out in front of the family’s little crowd (from the first, the NATO man never brought along fewer than three bodyguards). Romeo had offered Juliet the long-sleeved windbreaker he always kept knotted, moda Americana, around his slim midfielder’s hips.
So never mind that Barb had deprived the priest of his nap. She brought the subject back to this girl and today. “I should take her for an enemy, shouldn’t I? An enemy or an accident wa
iting to happen. Her looks alone, that should—”
“Beh, don’t exaggerate.” Cesare crossed his arms and knees the other way. “Don’t talk like a bourgeois. What worries you about that girl is, you don’t actually worry about her. ‘Should,’ you say, ‘should.’ You believe you should worry.”
Barb started to nod, almost getting it.
“You believe this—what would we call it, espionage? Espionage, the way the girl keeps sussing out your daily rounds? You believe this should worry you, but in fact it leaves you entirely impressed.”
The mother tried for more solid ground. “There’s also what’s happened with John Junior, don’t forget. It’s puppy love at full yap.”
Romy and JJ generated waves of attraction that Barbara could swear rustled the petals of any flowers nearby. There was a breeze even in the heat of mid-June, the most breathless urban canyon. The lovebirds rode the air currents with acrobatic balance, without so much as a glance at Silky’s gunmen. They had the mother trying to pull off the same, for a moment or two; they set her cuddling up with Paul or one of the girls and drifting off into Dimension Infatuation. But Barb was too much the adult to get so carried away, to believe herself beyond the reach of a stray bullet or a secret she’d rather leave buried.
“Full yap,” she repeated, as Cesare broke into a smile. “It doesn’t matter that JJ hasn’t gotten under her clothes.”
The old man gave her the eyebrow again. Earlier that week he’d let Barbara know that, as part of his ministry among the displaced and the clandestini, he carried a secret stash of condoms.
“Father, Cesare, those two, there’s no way they’ve gotten that far. Ask our friend the Lieutenant Major, you think he isn’t watching? So far as that guy’s concerned, the kissy-face stuff is bad enough.” Once more she massaged the beads through her purse-leather, settling into confession. “Myself, the truth is—I am impressed with her, aren’t I?” And she added, halting, each word another bead, that she believed it was good for the kids to have the distraction.
