by John Domini
And her children too. The family, minus Jay and plus Kahlberg, were all getting their photograph taken on the steps of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale.
They were tourists again. As the group posed for the papers, to either side waited day-trippers in loose bright nylon and shelf-like waist-packs. The museum overlooked the original downtown and dominated the guidebooks. Chris had read from the Blue Guide: “of prime importance.” Then there was the tourist pitch, Vedi Napoli e mouri, see the Nazionale and die. That was the translation, right? The museum was the only reason most Americans came to town, right? Its exhibits gleaned from the entire ruin-speckled lower peninsula, greater metropolitan Siren-land. As Silky’s choice for the first family excursion since dell’Ovo, it seemed a no-brainer.
Barbara went along.
This was after five days of recovery. Five days she’d hesitated, before heading to the Nazionale or anywhere else, instead shaping her time around the family’s eleven-year-old question mark. These were five days without talking to the media, number one, and without fighting over what she’d overheard in the castle hallway, number two. Of course she’d told her husband, the very night, and Jay had understood what the discovery meant. As the week went on, he’d arranged to stay home more than half the time. Once or twice when he and Barb were alone together, he’d felt for the band of her underwear, but even then she’d found his expression wary. Still, what was there to fight about, once the wife made clear that her worst fears had been confirmed? What was the point of yelling and banging? What mattered was telling the kids, finding the moment.
The Jaybird had his testy moments, his fully loaded stares, but by and large he too had kept their dealings mild. As Barb and he stretched out on the bed he would agree, in a conversational rumble, that she needed to leave for America and find a good legal mediator the moment his mother arrived. Indeed the big man’s self-restraint left the wife that much more committed to silence and withdrawal herself, during these days at home. To see the husband this way triggered, in her, her worst cross-the-heart zigzags yet. At her most confused, Barbara suffered the impression that the things she and Jay spoke of weren’t actually going to take place, but had only been given voice as a shared penance. A two-person rosary.
These were five days of many an unsettling sensation, with the girls endlessly underfoot and Silky watching the family’s every move. Sometimes the officer stopped in at the apartment and sometimes he used his cell, but either way he felt like a burden. After all, DiPio too dropped in for his checkups, AM and PM. Then there was Romy and JJ, finagling moments for their puppy love, for hugging and kissing out back by the palazzo dumpster, while the mother waited, in the doorway to the alley but made it a point not to watch, like the NATO gunman who’d also been party to arranging the tryst, averting his eyes at the alley entrance. The kids’ make-out sessions went on for a couple-three days before the Lieutenant-Major heard about them, of course he heard, and of course he called to object even as he was on the way up to the Vomero to make certain the teen sweethearts wouldn’t get together again—fat chance of that, Silky, but Barb had to deal with the man’s call as soon as she and her oldest returned to the apartment from their latest trip down to the alley. Barbara had to deal with it all these days, plus she always had to work in an hour or so of reading aloud to Paul, no matter what else was going on. Also she chose the DVDs for the evenings. Among them were a couple in Italian, made in Hollywood but dubbed in Italian, because she’d noticed how all her boys liked to laugh at what became of the dialog. Likewise after she saw how Paul enjoyed a certain flaked ricotta pastry, nuggeted with fruit bits, she arranged for the pasticceria to send over two a day, and when she saw him dig into the pizza from Acunzo, the following night she had them deliver a selection of their best. The day after dell’Ovo she’d announced to the kids that no one besides their father was allowed on the street until further notice, but then that very afternoon, following a call in Dick-&-Jane English from one of the NATO boys stationed at the stoop, she’d allowed the first of JJ’s conjugal visits down in the alley. And the next day there’d been the first of her renewed sessions with Cesare (and Barbara had the NATO van take her those few blocks, and she ignored the supplicant or two who always came to her, unless they reached her on the steps of her church, in which case she allowed herself a touch of their upraised Catholic doodads), and then the third day, gutting her stay-at-home rule altogether, she arranged an afternoon soccer scrimmage for JJ and Chris with the girls and Paul as cheerleaders. This was the middle child’s suggestion. His demand, rather, and he wouldn’t allow Mama to park him in a wheelchair, either. The family miracolino, it turned out, was the one for yelling and banging, so stir-crazy and over-examined by the third day that he waved his girlish hand in Mama’s face and hollered he wasn’t some kinda in, in, invalid for God’s sake! These dumb he, he, healing episodes weren’t that h-hard on him! As the boy carried on, rising to a full-blown preadolescent tantrum, he provided Barbara a contradictory reassurance; he reminded her of anger plain and simple, something she herself didn’t seem able to manage these days. Later, during the scrimmage itself, Paul spent most of his time jumping up and down along the sidelines, stippling the cuffs of his black pants with snippets of new-mown grass.
These were five days complicated further by a media circus, in which some cameraman was set up under the balcony every time the mother looked and newspaper stringers appeared never to need so much as a coffee break (anyway, in the Vomero you didn’t need to go far to find a good café). The ringmaster, however, wasn’t any journalist or production chief. Rather it was the revived African hunger striker who dominated the scene on the piazza out front of the family’s place, a young man still little more than skin and bone but nonetheless capable of such intensity that Barbara could feel his staring from five floors up. And soon enough, beside the not-so-clandestino, there appeared the enterprising Maddalena. The woman might’ve been a rookie reporter, but she’d learned long ago what it meant to have youth and good looks. At once she grasped the advantage in coming round to the front of the camera, especially buddied up beside a young man who’d been pretty lucky himself when it came to lips and eyes and bone structure. The would-be suicide, as he returned to his natural physical bearing, turned out to be a stirring package of lightsome and hard-packed, a coppery spokesmodel for The South. His color fell midway between the dun of Maddalena’s skin and the black of her hair, and this range of tones made them all the more eye-catching. Cuter still was the way they would help each other with their English, as they went on the air with repeated thanks to “these so special Americans who reach out to the poor and hopeless.” These video clips were replayed a hundred times, and every day either Barbara or Jay had to stand up against the photogenic young couple’s pressure for some sort of a press event with Paul. Either Barb or the Jaybird had to repeatedly refuse, while a small but respectable fraction of the world’s attention was drawn to this “refugee Lazarus” (the headline writers had a great time). By the end of his third day back on his feet the former illegal alien regained, with the help of Amnesty International and the Italian Green Party and the rock star Sting, his right to walk the streets.
At the same time, too, his colleagues in the Shell of the Hermit Crab were let out of the castle’s security ward, and none showed the least compunction about tearing into the local mozzarella, or a sprightly octopus salad. Apparently Maddalena’s pretty African, this man Barbara had tried to pray over, held some sort of command status. And on that same third day MTV Europe threw its weight behind the evanescent brown star, not sixty hours removed from almost dying in prison without a trial. Via a notarized and certified letter to the Lulucitas, the network promised the children new CDs, DVDs, X-box goodies and jeanswear, plus full-access passes to a half-dozen upcoming concerts in Rome and Milan and Florence, including travel, lodging, and two meals a day. All the family had to do in return was grant the station’s local affiliate an exclusive interview with Paul and an on-air meeting be
tween him and the African, now going by the name Fond (the word tended to get the English pronunciation on TV and the radio, but the young man himself preferred the French).
The parents held firm: No. No new denim, no hanging out with the rock stars. No way. But the very next morning that champion wrestler Mass Media, the Mangler, the Murgatroyd, threw a new move at the family. The mother had to contend with MTV on the phone, a VJ calling her at home, thanks to the old technology, hand-to-pocket and mouth-to-ear. Barbara picked up the receiver only to get her ear split by a moaning dual-speaker feedback, a warped girlish chirping—because the call was live and on the air, from Rome, and Chris and JJ, desperate for something to do after breakfast, had tuned in the webcast. The MTV-ette who’d made the call looked like an ice princess, her hair as bleached as bone, and after Barbara got the boys to mute the computer, she found the VJ’s tone unnervingly cheerful. The girl sounded far too bubbly for the way she was putting on the pressure: Why do you stay there in Naples if you don’t want the good things you can get from staying? All we want to do is give you more of the good sweet things you have already, like this nice big apartment in which to live and…
These were five days with one moment of doubt on top of another. The midnight traffic offered its relief, now and again, and before going to bed Barbara always got her hour or so of reading aloud. The daily down time allowed her to take a certain pride in how she’d protected the kids. She could see herself like an angel in one of the fairy tales, skating her children safely across the swarming Neapolitan surface tension, and motherly pride would shroom up in her chest. Once she even felt confident enough to shoo Chris and JJ off the computer and compose an email for Nettie, back at the Samaritan Center.
Barbara’s mentor from the Holy Name was conscientious as ever about getting back, and she didn’t seem at all disturbed by the mother’s questions—on the contrary, Nettie had studied cases like Paul’s. While pursuing her Master’s, her email explained, the former nun had written a paper on healing episodes. Research had established that the phenomena occurred most commonly in children entering puberty, and the counselor listed a handful of informational websites, “reliable scientific sites, none of that Christian balderdash.” She mentioned a couple of books too, and summarized what she recalled from her Master’s work, saying that healing such as Paul’s tended to be “situational”—that is, the “acting out” was rooted in earlier trauma—and “its incidence is never defined geographically.” That last left Barbara frowning at the screen, recalling other times when her guru had slipped into a koan, too much Zen and not enough plain English. The mother sent a follow-up and Nettie proved to be still online. Briskly she clarified: miracle cures, “so-called,” were never limited to a particular place. A child might begin laying on hands in the middle of Kansas, but after that he or she could do it over any rainbow and down any yellow brick road; “what matters isn’t the physical environment, but rather the continuing vulnerability to the root psychosis.” So whatever energy was at work in Paul, these days, it would travel with him. Barbara nodded at the screen, and yet after a moment the voice in her head wasn’t Nettie’s but Jay’s. Barb could hear her soon-to-be-ex as clearly as if he were crouched beside her, reading the mail. Owl Girl, hey. This means New York would be worse, for Mr. Paul. If he’s still going to be doing this kind of thing, back in New York? In the media capital? Forget about it.
These were her five days, plus a transatlantic call on Father’s Day. Her quiet Dad had a one-bedroom in Boca Raton. Then Barbara went meekly to the Museo Nazionale.
Not the boys, though. Paul wasn’t the only one who’d gotten a little stir-crazy. Before the family went down to the Humvee, while Barbara was setting out the laundry on the balcony, John Junior had claimed he didn’t want to be seen with the PR man. The big teen claimed he’d “almost rather stay home” than follow Kahlberg around again. “I mean,” JJ had said, gulping down his second orange juice, “after what my girl told me.” My girl. As for Chris, he’d come out spoiling for a fight. Once the press gathered round, out on the museum steps, Barb’s second-oldest began to pick at Silky.
“The Borbons were monsters,” Chris insisted, there in front of the cameras. In another moment he and the officer were squabbling over kings and queens dead and gone for nearly two hundred years. The Borbon dynasty seemed admirable to Kahlberg; he waved his fat briefcase at the front pillars, braced by scaffolding, and reiterated that the museum was a Borbon legacy from the eighteenth century. In those days Naples had been the most dazzling stop on the Grand Tour. “Goethe came to visit, you heard of him? Mozart, he wrote some of his greatest—”
“Yeah yeah,” Chris said. “But for the average person, what good did that do? Like, so what if they had a few celebrities at the palace?”
Silky played his annoyance for laughs. “If I may continue. The present structure, as you see, is painted Pompeiian red—”
“Exactly. The new monsters imitated the old monsters.”
Barbara tried to follow, anything to distract her from the spineless way she held her place in the photo lineup. Chris argued that the Nazionale didn’t fit the standard notion of a major museum, since it had only a few major pieces. “There’s like, for instance, the Farnese Bull.” Rather Naples offered a slice of life, two- and three-thousand-year-old life, thanks to an unmatched collection of kitchenware and bedroom accessories, sifted from the buried homes at the foot of Vesuvius. Barbara gave a nod, thoughtful. What she was trying to think of, however, was something else again: how to escape at last, and for good, from her own time-worn kitchen and bedroom. Her fifteen-year-old had mentioned a bull, and some big creature like that, a monster really, had been clomping around her home for almost a month now. But the mother still hadn’t figured out how to harness the beast. This morning she could see that her hard feelings had rubbed off on Chris and John Junior, and even with all the bedtime reading, the aggravation must be getting to the others as well. But when was she going to tell them the truth? Just tell her children and get the awful business underway?
Here on the steps of the Nazionale, in full view of the press and the supplicants and assorted tourists, Chris was the one upsetting the applecart. The boy fingered his glasses up his nose and claimed that the best pieces from Pompeii and Herculaneum, “like, the five-star items,” had been stolen by the British or the French.
“Mn,” said Kahlberg. “I see where you’re going, big shooter. This is all about those big nasty-damn superpowers, pushing around the poor and the helpless.”
“Sure.” Chris explained that the nasty-damn powers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had raped the newly unearthed ruins. “They took the major items. They took the emperor’s head.” But the Naples collection represented a kind of revenge. Once the foreigners had hauled off their booty, locals had a free hand with the smaller stuff.
“The real stuff,” Chris said. “The collection here, it isn’t about the emperor’s head. It’s a slice of life. Like, the toolshed, the table arrangements.”
“Arrangements,” Romy put in. “This sounds like Naples for sure.”
Romy, for sure. Ignoring the hoots of the construction workers, she’d been waiting on the steps when the family arrived. Her wisecrack drew a terrific laugh from JJ, rocking him out of the family lineup, freeing him from the need to come up with some sarky remark of his own. The older boy and the gypsy shared a soft kiss.
Once more the workers hooted and the cameras went off. What Barb noticed was how Kahlberg’s pale face grew heavy, and she knew how the man felt. The idea made the mother slip her fingers through Dora’s hair, at her hip, but there was no denying it: she had a pretty good idea what this officer was feeling. He had to stand there bombarded by static when the whole time the Off switch lay in easy reach. About the dell’Ovo escapade, too, Kahlberg had had to remain polite and aboveboard. He’d said no more than the obvious. We can’t have that, Mrs. Lulucita. Mrs. Lulucita, I’ve been assigned to this family by my superiors, and your
safety is my first concern. Then too, the mother had to admit that, insofar as anyone had kept the attentions of the press under control, it had been Captain America.
Besides, this morning Kahlberg had no objection to Romy tagging along. You would’ve thought that his screaming fit outside San Lorenzo had never happened. Not that the liaison didn’t find a moment to slip in a nasty word about John Junior’s exotic crush. As the family climbed out of the van, Silky muttered to Barbara: “Knew that little skank wouldn’t have any trouble finding this place.” But otherwise he ignored the girl. On the museum steps, Chris and the Lieutenant Major jawed back and forth as though Romy weren’t there. Barb wondered if, by setting up a visit at the best-known tourist destination in town, the PR man were offering a truce.
Maybe the man was making changes. Actual changes…
Also the Lieutenant Major didn’t try to keep the gypsy from coming in, and once the little group was into the cool of old marble and high ceilings, Barbara’s concern shifted to Paul. She laid her fingers against his cheek, his neck, before he nudged away and a woman from the museum staff stepped forward with two photos to bless. Baby photos, these were, a little girl to judge from the color of her pj’s. One was for Barb and the other for the miracolino. Both Mother and Child were in demand now. Believers hadn’t failed to notice—of course they hadn’t—that before each healing la Mama Americana had said a prayer. Supplicants had reached out to Barbara outside her church and, after Paul got through shouting at her, along the sidelines of the children’s soccer outing up in the Vomero.
