by John Domini
When she heard Jay, she couldn’t miss it.
From the first chewy syllable, more Queens than Brooklyn, she couldn’t miss it. She’d need to be a lot more lost than this not to recognize that voice. Barbara pulled up short on the poorly-matched flagstones, outside the room in which his complaining squawked and seesawed. She knew he was complaining too, she couldn’t mistake that either, after so many evenings spent nodding along with as much sympathy as she could muster. Her husband was talking in a small space, a room without an echo. He’d actually left the door ajar, behind him. From what Barb could see, peeking crook-necked, the Jaybird and whoever he was talking to had squeezed into a cubicle, a nook for a Norman archer. She saw too that she hadn’t escaped the castle’s surveillance grid: a video camera hung in a hallway corner.
“I know it’s partly my fault,” Jay said, more loudly. “I know. Hey, why else would I ask for confession?”
There was a reply, quiet, the accent very different.
“Well, I have sinned,” Barbara’s husband went on. “I’ve lied, number one.”
The confessor’s response again eluded her, sounding almost like a musical phrase. But her nerves enjoyed a dual awakening, from exercise and from amazement. In another moment she’d understood who the priest was too.
“I’ve lied,” Jay repeated, “but not that way. There’s been no adultery, father.”
“Cesare, please.”
Cesare, who else? Judging from what he’d told Barb, the priest would’ve preferred having his ministry down here, within wafer’s reach of the strikers.
“A couple of times,” Jay went on, “I’ve talked to women more than I should’ve. One woman anyway. But, hey. Barb knows all about it.”
Fresh heat rose in her face. For a moment she might’ve had Maddalena’s spotlight back in her eyes.
“She knows, it’s in the past. Happened when she was pregnant with the twins.”
The priest put in a word, again inaudible.
“Yeah, three kids and I wasn’t much past thirty. But that, hey, that was the idea. That sounded right to me.”
Another scrap of Irish melody.
“Yeah Paul was an accident. Came out of the blue, Mr. Paul. Still.”
Cesare, thought the wife, stop interrupting. Let me hear about his late inventory.
“Now that woman that time, I mean the other time, with the twins on the way. My hand on the Bible, on the eyes of my children, that was just talking.”
Barbara got a decent breath, her circulation settling.
“The wrong kind of talking, okay, sometimes. Inappropriate, okay. But I never touched her, and you ask me, hey. It was talking to myself. I had to. I had to hear somebody say, out loud, how I could do this. Twins on the way, Cesare, I mean. Old Jay had to turn himself into something new. New man, new kind of husband and father.”
The priest changed his tone, probing.
“Well, I went to confession. Sure. That kind of thing. I, I had people. I had Barbara too. Barb and me, we’ve always talked. But I mean, two more kids, just like that. Girls at last, okay, that’s nice, but, hey, who’s the breadwinner? Who’s bringing home the bacon? First the baby food and then the bacon. It’s all part of the package, Father, Cesare. And in the back of mind, the whole time, I’m thinking, my Barbara, my wife—she lied to me. About her cycle. My wife lied to me. I had condoms, I mean.”
Barb suffered a spasm of embarrassment, so absurd under the circumstances that it had her checking up-corridor and down.
“No, no, no way,” her husband went on. “With the girls, that wasn’t an accident. Barb admitted it.”
Admitted it more or less. She’d fudged the truth about her ovulation, before the girls came along, but she’d also told him what she wanted. More or less.
“She told me, ‘Paul’s never home. It’s like he’s got his driver’s license.’”
A long marriage was another no-secrets-dot-com, everything came to light in time, but the code could be hard to decipher. Barbara missed Cesare’s next question.
“Yeah yeah,” Jay replied, “a house full of men, that must’ve been hard for her. The Owl, she wanted some girls around. Okay. That—I’ve got a handle on that. Hey, I’m kind of more-the-merrier, myself. You can probably tell the kind of Pop I am, can’t you, Cesare? Soccer with ten kids at once, you can see that. So, having a couple more, that’s not what’s so aggravating. That’s not what’s making me lie to Barb. What’s aggravating is, that Owl Girl, these days. The woman just doesn’t understand.”
She reached for her elbows. Here it came: the cost of everything and the sacrifices a man had to make. “She just—it’s like she can’t do the math. I mean, the extra bedroom we had to have, Father, five months they were working on that. Five months, and after the first month, forget about it. They throw the bid out the window.”
A confessor couldn’t tell a sinner to shut up, but the priest’s interruptions started to sound irritated. Once, the priest spoke with force enough for Barb to hear: “Well, cheating on a contract, in Naples too that kind of thing has been known to happen.” Still Jay poured out his woes. “But it’s not just the money, Cesare, can’t you see that? It’s about respect.” Then in the next breath he was back to money. “Single-salary household, you know? And there’s swimming lessons, there’s play shoes and there’s church shoes. Plus, hey. Can’t take ‘em to school unless the minivan’s still on warranty.”
The wife was backing away from the door, thinking she wouldn’t learn anything new here. When she looked down the sloping hallway, however, she faced a policeman at the next corner. He had a phone to his ear and his eyes on l’ Americana.
Cesare at last managed to shift the subject.
“Then, I mean. When Barb started to look into those abuse cases, from the Center. You have no idea. The worst.”
The priest spoke more sharply.
“No.” Jay’s tone softened. “I’m not, not sick of her. No, Father. Cesare. I’m still in love with Barbara. Pushing forty-five, going through the change now maybe—what do I care? That woman, I don’t want to lose her.”
Again the wife crept towards the makeshift confessional.
“No, it’s not just the family. Don’t give me that, the ‘investment.’ The family thing, sure, I love it. But, I mean. First it’s Barbara herself My Owl Girl.”
Down the corridor, the cop strode out of sight.
“Okay, that girl she brought home last winter. Okay, that was terrible. That was a nightmare. If we’re going to talk about that.”
Through the few inches of open door, Barb could make out the curve of her husband’s back. He must’ve been rubbing his face.
“I mean, I had to be the bad guy. I had to be the one, send Maria Elena back to Children’s Services. But, still. Hey. I’m the injured party, after that, but still, I didn’t want a divorce. No way.”
The Jaybird sounded as if he’d gotten his head out of his hands. He acknowledged that, after Maria Elena, he understood there needed to be some changes made. “I mean, the way things were going, forget about it. My Barbara, she needed meaning, you know? Meaning. But then I found it for her, didn’t I? The work I found in this city, hey. Brought Barb a lot farther than just across an ocean. Brought her some meaning, big time, and that proves, that fucking proves—excuse me. Forgive me, Father, but still. What I did coming to Naples, it proves divorce is not for me. Hey? It’s not for Jay, the end of the family. Jay, his family, he’ll go halfway around the world to save it. He’ll take risks. He’ll fight, he’ll lie and, and he’ll…”
Then a silence, surprising. Barb had thought that Jay was going to lapse once more into complaining, but now the priest had to prompt him, twice.
“Bless me, Father,” the husband said, “for I have sinned. I have lied to my wife. I love her, but. I have lied to her. I’ve lied about what I’m doing here in Naples, and she’s starting to figure it out, and still. I go on lying. I’m not telling her the truth, anyway. What I’m doing, it’s—I make
reports to NATO, Father. To one man at NATO. An officer, you figure it out. He says he needs to know about the refugee underground. The big dark hairy-scary so-called underground.”
In the hallway the mother had drawn up straight, no lazy Franciscan T.
“I mean. Kind of people you’ve got downstairs, what’s so scary about them? But. I hear a name in a tent, I tell my guy. I keep my ears out, Papa the Spy. Because what I hear, it could be serious, according to my friend. My NATO contact. Serious, what ‘these people’ could do.
“And, hey. This guy, why shouldn’t I make him happy? I make him happy, that’s money. That’s money there, that’s benefits. The man can do things, Father. Cesare. For my family, he can do a lot. You figure it out.”
She’d been right to come. This was something she could offer even the starving creatures downstairs.
“But, I mean. This so-called radical underground, what is the big deal? The big hairy-scary…Father, we’re not talking Al-Qaeda out at the Center. Back in New York, for instance, that memorial at Ground Zero? Hey, that place has got nothing to worry about from Naples. I mean, Muslims in Italy, you know what? Muslims tend to go for the boom towns, up north. Milan, they go for. Follow the money, right? But down here, the clandestini I’ve got, forget about it. The one time they tried anything—what? They grabbed the cook. The cook, and he never even got his hat off. He never even left the kitchen. That’s the kind of hard core I’ve got out at the Center.”
Jay might’ve laughed. “NATO, I mean. Your tax dollars at work. Lately, now, you know who Kahlberg keeps asking about?”
Speaking of names. Barb pictured Lieutenant Major Kahlberg poring over a list, a schoolboy over a skin mag.
“That gypsy girl, Romy. The Lieutenant keeps asking if I’ve heard anything about Romy. I mean, what’s he want? We all know what Romy had to do, back before Paul. It wasn’t about national security, what she had to do. So what’s he want, the Lieutenant Major? Especially since the girl has changed. Since Paul, she’s changed. Nowadays, national security, anything like that, it’s a joke for Romy. Kahlberg—she tells me to say hi to Kahlberg. Just last night she told me. She’s still got friends out at the Center, people she used to run with, and last night she tells me to say hi to Kahlberg. ‘Mr. Kahlberg your NATO contact,’ she tells me. Forget about it, Cesare. For that girl, that whole thing’s a joke. She knows my arrangement’s supposed to be a secret.”
Both men needed a long moment, enough time for Barbara to notice a bit of a commotion farther off A shout or two perhaps. Then, Jay:
“The lying, Father. The lying to Barb, it hurts me. It’s—I have sinned, Father. Thanks for meeting me like this, too. I know what it’s like to have to make arrangements on the fly, so thanks, really. And bless me, for I have sinned. But then there’s Barbara, Cesare. Her with her I-want-a-divorce, but nothing happens. I mean, waiting around for my crazy Mom? Plus, the sex? A lot of sex, you ask me. Multiple orgasms—Father, I have to tell somebody.
“Okay, maybe it’s all part of the confusion. Part of the pain, okay. But. She keeps going back to you, too, Cesare. There’s that too. I mean, with whom am I speaking, when it comes to my Barbara? What’s she want?”
Barb had come her closest yet to the stony closet. She was squaring herself away, preparing to step in and speak up. She and Jay needed to talk.
“Does she really want,” Jay repeated, “to grow old alone?”
Barb could see that the Jaybird had started massaging his face again. She thought that she heard him fighting tears, choking, but now there was new noise in the halls. A fresh commotion, substantial, from a group of some size.
“Bad enough,” Jay was saying, “how lonely I am already.”
A group was coming this way, uphill, with scraping footfalls and sharp but indistinct jabber. They moved in bursts, now striding along swiftly and now slowing down. Barbara backed away from her unsuspecting husband. She had the thought that she didn’t want to be spotted, and she fretted about the camera over her head. A foolish thought—wasn’t she planning to tell Jay exactly what she’d heard? Wasn’t she going to throw it in Kahlberg’s face too?
Her husband’s voice had regained its strength. “What is that?” he was asking. “That out in the hall, you hear it?”
The cubicle’s door, sluggish with age, creaked wide. Jay emerged looking down-ramp, his back to Barbara. When the oncoming crowd appeared at the bottom of the hallway, at first she didn’t see them. Instead she studied her husband’s head and shoulders, his hair improbably full despite the bald spot.
“Pop?” asked John Junior. “What are you doing here?”
“Jay?” asked Silky Kahlberg. “Jay, my man? This is a surprise.”
The voices came from opposite ends of the crowd. The liaison officer stood at the front, the farthest uphill, while Barbara’s oldest was among those at the rear, almost out of sight down around the corridor’s corner. The gang presented an unlikely mix, altogether. The mother needed a few moments to sort everyone out, kids and guards and Silky and, about the middle of the group, gypsy Romy in full makeup. The girl in fact looked better than the Lieutenant Major. Kahlberg’s blazer hung lopsided, revealing a corner of his holster strap, and a swatch of long hair was sweat-stuck across his forehead. Barb enjoyed a surge of triumph: gotcha. She’d caught the officer with his silk down. But this exhilaration dwindled quickly when she got her first decent look at John Junior. After all, her seventeen-year-old could move faster than anyone in the crowd, and yet he was the last up the hallway. There had to be a reason—like his younger brother Paul, looking drained, hanging by his spread arms between JJ and Chris. The two older brothers weren’t quite carrying Paul, he still had his feet on the ground, but Barbara’s middle child was clearly bushed. He had trouble keeping his head up, now hiding and now revealing his neatly done collar button.
Beside the boys stood a group arranged in the same fashion, with the two on the outside propping up the one in the center. These were two policemen flanking a handsome African. The black wore serious shackles, wrist to waist to leg. Nevertheless he showed Barbara a smile unlike any she’d seen before, a glowing surprise of a reminder, in pink and gold and weathered ivory, that she had come to this city and castle knowing next to nothing about what she was getting into. Even his cheeks seemed to glow, and one of these was scarred with a pair of crescent moons.
“What is this?” asked Jay. “What are you guys doing here?”
Chris and JJ shared a look, across their sagging brother. It was Dora and Syl who said it first.
Chapter Seven
The days that followed, the days and the nights, had Barbara thinking often of her childhood visits to Manhattan. Bedtime had felt different over at her mother’s cousins’ place off Lafayette. That branch of the family lived with another world of night noise. Little Barba-bella had come across the East River before her mother ran away, but it was after the disappearance that Barb had spent the nights that now came back to her with the greatest intensity. On those nights she’d been hustled over to the old Little Italy because there’d been word of a lead, a possibility. And in the second-story front space of the cousins’ brownstone, formerly her Mama’s bedroom, the traffic spoke to the visiting girl. Barbara would notice the heart-of-the-borough rumble when she was left alone to slip into her nightshirt, that tender cotton, and her eyes would follow the pattern of the headlights coming through the blinds, a yellow surf across ceiling and wall. She’d pick up the noise in the morning too, before her cousin poked her head into the room and began to wheedle, like the soothing fussbudget she was, about getting dressed for Sunday Mass. During the night, in the streets towards Roosevelt Park, the machinery sometimes offered a bit that she could identify. There might be a horn going off, a truck gearing up, or the squawk and clomp of a dented door. But Barba-bella could hear that sort of thing over in Carroll Gardens. Around her mother’s former home, rather, the night growled through risings and fallings that the daughter couldn’t understand, and she
loved the sound precisely for that, because she could never get her mind around it all, because it contained the ignition, transmission, and brake of too, too many others to know. In that motor noise beyond the narrow brick-framed windows, there resided possibilities so wild that her preteen self could no more limit them to particular car parts than she could tuck her fertile visitor’s dreams into neat stories over the morning orange juice. Rather the whole overnight sequence, the horsepower coil that wheeled her into sleep and the sapphire glints left behind when she woke—all this she could only give the shape of hope itself. In the city she heard so much energy at work, at large, that she had to believe some part of it would complete its trek. Some part of that mumbling runaround always made it the entire long way out wherever it had to go and then back again; it returned to the girl, to the pillow-space beside her, chuckling in an accent and smelling faintly of cheese and olives.
The Manhattan traffic had done more for her than any other night-time soundtrack, including that of the good Bridgeport neighborhood where she’d lived as a five-star Mom. She had to admit, too, that the intervening years had hardly felt devoid of happiness. She’d even taken the same fractious reassurance in the stories at the Samaritan Center, the uproar of guilts and resentments that always somewhere revealed, improbably, and if only they could see it, fulfillment for the people involved. Also there were evenings when Barbara found the same comfort in Naples. The Vomero wasn’t so bourgeois that you didn’t get people driving at night. Even after the uproar at Castel dell’Ovo, and even with the chatter of the troops beneath her balcony, she had sleepy moments carried along within the infinite circumnavigations of a vast motor-driven flock, the same as had cradled her ear and spirit years ago in Lower Manhattan. Buildings and people. Downtown palaver without end, forever making the rounds.
Not that, now as they came up on three weeks in the city, the mother could forget the trouble she’d seen the first time she looked at a map. Whatever good she might get from the night traffic, in daylight Barbara was barely coping. Five days after dell’Ovo, her counterespionage, she found herself once more trailing behind the Lieutenant-Major. She’d discovered his secret, his and Jay’s and yet nearly a week had gone by with her doing next to nothing about it. This morning again, she followed the NATO plan.
