Earthquake I.D.

by John Domini

  My good-looking young grandson here, she’d told the officer in charge, is withering away, positively withering away, from sitting around the house all day.

  JJ used the same argument on Barb: Mom, I’m sick of this. When she pressed him, the boy upped the stakes. “You’re telling me I have to stay home all day, every day? Forget about it. Book me a flight to La Guardia.”

  John Junior defended Aurora too, saying she’d made him laugh. Think of the benefit to your womenfolk, the grandmother had told the cops. The girls in this city have been pining away, absolutely pining away, for lack of their eye-candy.

  On top of that, JJ pointed out, Aurora had known better than to bring Paul downstairs. She’d understood that Paul and the girls had to stay in the apartment, and she’d made sure that the two older boys had a plainclothesman bodyguard, too, while they enjoyed a bit of sulfur-dusted air and sun. As for Sant’Elmo, JJ claimed, it was handy. “I mean, Mom, do you think you could remember we’re the same as anybody else? We’re just normal young Americans.” If you asked him, the folks around the Vomero were doing a better job of that than his own mother. During his time outside, John Junior got the distinct impression that the local miracle-frenzy had started to fade. The believers in the streets had been content with a wave or a nod, and none of the media had bothered to follow the brothers out of the piazza. JJ could swear he’d heard a newsstand owner shout lascia li stare, leave them alone.

  Really, the boys’ little “prison-break” was nothing that Mom should worry about. “We had a good time, over there. Sant’Elmo, it’s got all these neat places to hide.”

  The mother’s voice tightened, though with the grandmother in the apartment she couldn’t shout. Had JJ forgotten how, just the day before…?

  The boy rolled his eyes. “Nobody’s gunning for us, Mom. That was all about Our Man in NATO.”

  Barbara’s husband had given her the same assurances, or reassurances, during their walk along the waterfront. Of course the couple had their protection inching along the boulevard behind them, a Consular sedan, bulletproof. Roebuck had arranged the car, the driver, and the armed guard. But Barbara and Jay got the time alone that the husband had announced they “could use,” following “a meeting like this, a roller coaster.” The two of them strolled close by the small boats tethered to the rocks, wooden craft many of them, hand-painted. With the rumble of the other traffic, with the breeze and the sea, husband and wife could speak from the heart. The Jaybird had pointed out that up at the Refugee Center, during the near-month since his near-kidnap, the American Boss had often spent as much as an hour out of sight of his flak-jacketed protectors. If Silky’s crooks had wanted a piece of him, they’d had plenty of opportunity.

  Barbara had nodded but frowned. Even as she and her husband talked, she’d noticed a refugee African on their tail. When they’d gone out along the breakwater, she’d called Jay’s attention to the man, an obvious clandestino. The poor guy hung back behind the Consulate’s Audi, in a torn t-shirt bearing a broken pillar.

  The Jaybird had rolled his eyes—the expression that John Junior would imitate a few hours later. He’d asked if his Owl Girl was frightened of beggars all of a sudden. Frightened of the homeless, in this city? The husband could understand she’d been shaken up; her change of heart made everything more vulnerable, more precious.

  Barbara had cut the man off, letting him know what she’d seen on the website.

  Jay had taken the news calmly, looking over their skinny tag-along. The African stared back over their freshly-polished ride, no doubt trying to assess whether they might give him a Euro. Barb at first hadn’t felt her husband’s touch at her hip.

  Today, he’d told her, we start over. It’s all going to be on another basis. No lying and no doubletalk.

  They confronted their two oldest that evening, as soon as the boys revealed how they’d gone waltzing off to Sant’Elmo. Once more the parents asked the grandmother to step out onto the balcony, and Barbara allowed herself to bark a bit. Yet all she and Jay got for their efforts was another wild pixel chase through the Lulucita pages on the ‘net. She wound up reading not only the saint-of-fire business again, but also a number of messages she hadn’t picked up before. JJ and Chris knew where all the secrets were, a link that played a song about the Camorra, and another that called up a movie clip, or was it two clips? One moment you saw Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren, the next Lemmon and Mastroanni. The two teenagers knew about them all, and they argued that every piece of input, in every format, was intended as a message for the family. Every word was meant for Jay and Barb and the kids. Whenever the people who’d followed Paul’s story got together to chat, not a line of agate type went by without some private high sign to the Lulucitas, a compliment or a warning or a nudge. Every posting was intended to close the gap between the person at the keyboard and the American santa famiglia, a wireless laying-on of hands.

  “It’s like,” JJ said, “say we’re the Talking Heads. I mean, we’re one of the guys who used to be the Talking Heads. Say, then we visit a Talking Heads site. Hey, everybody on the site believes he’s our best friend. Everybody’s the Unknown Head.”

  “Everybody thinks,” Chris said, “they’ve got some special private connection to us. Like, they’re saying their prayers, and they believe we’re listening.”

  “Yeah. Like when Nerdly here prays to the girls from Victoria’s Secret.”

  Jay glowered; he wouldn’t let them get started. Barbara, meantime, understood that what her sons had shown her in no way constituted a straight answer.

  “All right,” Chris said, “think of it like—what Paul said earlier about staying in Naples. There’s a lot going on. There’s a whole lot out there.”

  “A lot. And Chris and me, all of us, we’re just this one small part.”

  The boys’ line of talk fell well short of convincing Barbara, they didn’t change how she read the message on the site or the trip to Sant’Elmo, but they did leave her impressed. John Junior especially, showing backbone and maturity. Before Naples, before so challenging a girlfriend (if you could call Romy a girlfriend), he would’ve told Mom and Pop everything. He couldn’t have stood up to their grilling. And both these teenagers, Barb had to admit, had learned to handle their parents a lot better than even so recently as during their Memorial Day excursion to Mystic seaport. The boys had figured out that today Mom and Pop would back off—without admitting anything of the sort, to be sure—so long as they could tell there’d been nothing too serious about the tryst at Sant’Elmo. The ‘rents just needed some assurance that the get-together had been quick, clean, and free of burdensome consequences. And that’s as much as they got, Jay and Barb: they could see that whatever had happened in the castle, it hadn’t left a mark. JJ and his girl hadn’t even found a place to lie down.

  What Mom and Pop needed, in effect, was to post their own message, on their carefully encrypted site. Good parents, that was the message. We’re good parents.

  “Yeah, think of Paul,” JJ said, following his brother’s lead. “He’s feeling pretty cooped up around here too. And then, I mean, his episodes.”

  “He’s acting out,” Chris put in. “Like, with the onset of puberty, the hormone thing. It’s got to be some form of acting out”

  “Hey, Paul wasn’t a saint to start with. Our brother was a normal young American. And you guys are good parents, you can see.”

  “It’s Hormones 101. JJ and me, we’ve got to get him out, do something normal.”

  The boys were getting so shrewd, they were practically Neapolitan.

  “It could’ve been a lot worse, hey? All he’s been through.”

  “Could’ve been a lot worse, and crazy. Like, when you think of some of the old saint stuff. The stigmata, the visions. Could’ve been hormones, you think.”

  The onus fell back on Barb and Jay—how much did they need to know? How ugly did they want the evening to get? Chris shut down the browser, so the family’s Christmas-shot screen saver replaced
the site’s tormented pictography, and the mother moved to the balcony doors. Vesuvius had stained the sunset a sallow white, like a t-shirt handed down from brother to brother.

  Then the door slid open. The mother-in-law stood before her, smiling and half naked. She’d recognized the end of private time.

  Aurora was forever nearby, just off-screen. Barbara could see the old woman in the very face of the grandson who might now be planning something dubious with his gypsy girlfriend. Jay’s mother was the Irish one in the family, the one who’d gifted her first grandchild with puckish black eyes and laugh-ready dimples. She was a beauty, Aurora. At seventy-something her build remained catlike and her wrinkles suited the shape of her face. She’d helped herself to a bit of cosmetic surgery, to be sure, and she freely owned up to these “repairs.” Also her long widowhood had included seminars on wardrobe and yoga and toners and proteins. Barbara’s notions of old Italian women, of crones in black with faces like bark—the kind of aging she imagined for her own mother—these were the opposite of Aurora. Jay’s mother even knew which events showed her off to best advantage. She was a familiar face at high-profile benefits around New York, dolling herself up for the sake of homeless shelters or free medical clinics. Two or three times, when her dress or her companion had been right, Aurora’s picture had run in the Times Sunday Styles. Even the two-piece she wore out on the Vomero balcony provided a camera-friendly complement to her hair, a richly flowing red. Silky.

  A lucky woman, she was, and getting the most out of a long widowhood. Jay’s father had suffered a freak accident for which some of the wealthiest people on earth were liable. Paul Lulucita (Jay had put off passing along the name) had strayed into a mid-Manhattan movie set, some epic about a monster loose in the city. The director had loved the look of broken power lines showering sparks over standing water. So young Jay had been gifted with an exceptional trust fund, Hollywood blood-money, and even from overseas Barbara had made sure to check the remaining investments. The retirement account had grown nicely, and it looked like they wouldn’t have to worry about the college fund any more either—not since they accepted the offer from Roebuck. More than that, some years ago now the wife had grasped the emotional impact of Jay’s tragedy, the way the sudden loss of his Dad had helped prompt the son into marriage at an earlier age than might’ve been wise. Barb understood even, thanks to the Samaritan Center, how her husband’s vaporized father matched up with her own runaway mother. The absent parents provided a relationship balance, a set of ghost parallel bars.

  Or you could put it another way: you could say the relationship had been trouble from Day One. Trouble was where Aurora came in. The death of her husband had scarred her differently, very, from how it had marked her son. In the widow’s case, flirtation had been raised to the level of a credo: I seduce, therefore I am. So long as I remain more flesh than bone, I’ll go on seeking fleshy pleasures. Barb recalled when they’d first met, a high-breasted Barbara Cantasola shaking hands with the mother of her hard-bellied new boyfriend. This had been barely a year after the accident, and already the widow had a man at the kitchen table, his head slick with Grecian Formula, looking over a brochure for a spa in midtown. The movie studio responsible for her husband’s death had abandoned its project, but Aurora had no qualms about stepping in where they’d left off, the monster loose in the city. Nor was the mother shamed by her son’s quick retrenchment in family life. As an in-law, too, she flaunted her “capering.” She’d shown up at Barbara’s house with men-friends as young as thirty-three (granted, no one saw his I.D.) and as old as something close to eighty. Her one rule for the children was that she never be called “Grandma.” If the kids didn’t forget she would delight them with gifts for their saints’ days, or for Easter or Pentecost or Advent or Epiphany. It might’ve been the woman’s idea of yin and yang, getting lots of men and giving lots of toys.

  During every visit, Barbara would study that weekend’s date. In the man’s eyes, she always saw the same questions: This isn’t going to get much crazier, is it? It isn’t going to get much scarier? Not much, brother. The affairs never lasted. The men would slingshot around the grandmother for a month or two, then whistle away with their tails on fire. And here on this side of the Atlantic the air-time wasn’t likely to get any less turbulent. Aurora had arrived for the visit without a boy-toy, and Barbara would bet—what? the cost of a remodel for Roebuck’s office?—she would just bet that her mother-in-law was going to score some local talent. The woman claimed she lived in Greenwich Village because she found it “romantic,” and Naples might’ve been the city that had given Greenwich Village the idea. Her most likely victim in town, in fact, began to seem obvious by the fourth or fifth day after the grandmother’s arrival. Dottore DiPio, sure. The doctor was a bit of a dandy himself, and during these housebound days, his beard-plucking grew ever more agitated around the grandmother.

  When Aurora spoke to the priest, on the other hand, the man went quiet. He stopped shuffling his knobby joints. Barbara assumed the old playgirl offended him, but when she asked Cesare about her in-law, she didn’t like his answers.

  “Our Savior,” he said, “condemns hypocrisy. The whited sepulcher, don’t you know, that hides our rot. But your Aurora accepts her decay. She honors it.”

  Barb figured Cesare was impressed by the widow’s charities. Barb had told him how, at the Samaritan Center, the donors’ plaque listed Jay’s mother as an “Angel.”

  “She’ll be useful to you,” the priest went on. “Italians respect a woman like Aurora. With her around, they’ll tend more to steer clear.”

  Barbara had noticed as much already. When she did get out, these days, she experienced the same falloff in local attentions as John Junior. The day Jay began his duties at DiPio’s downtown clinic, she took everyone else back to the sports facility, the soccer field. Everyone, including Aurora and the security. But this time, there and back, even Paulo miracolo went pretty much un-harassed. The boy was asked to bless a saint’s medallion or two, naturally, and Barbara as well. Also the group had another clandestino keeping an eye on them, trailing the crew for a few blocks, while never daring to approach, to panhandle. But the guy was another harmless stick of a sub-Saharan. He disappeared as soon as Barb pointed him out to one of the security. The only significant interruption, really, came from the energetic Maddalena.

  The celebrity girlfriend no longer needed to carry a camera, but that day she’d settled in with the other media, behind the sawhorses in the piazza. She stuck around, too, after Jay hiked off to the funiculare and the clinic downtown. By the time Barbara and the others appeared on the stoop, Maddalena might’ve been the only journalist waiting. Then she hurdled the sawhorse, with an eye-catching flip of her tight-jeaned legs. The security didn’t faze the girl. Two of the squad had to brace Maddalena in a way that made Barbara think of the scene out in the tent-chapel at the Refugee Center. But even then the young woman kept asking, just this side of screaming, that Paul meet with her boyfriend Fond. Ten minutes was all the former hunger striker asked for, ten minutes.

  One of the men from Interpol reached under his lapel, but the mother put out a hand. There’d been enough of that.

  Maddalena didn’t fail to notice. “Signora,” she cried, “you know my Fondo! You know he has good heart!”

  JJ bent towards his mother’s ear. “I’m so sure,” he said, “this girl knows all about a good heart. That’s why she was in such a rush to get her face on the news.”

  “He will give you new meaning!” Maddalena called, as the family started away. “Your prayers and your miracles, they will have new meaning! A new life!”

  But to judge from the rest of the excursion, free of stop and go and hassle that had always been part of the package with Kahlberg, the Lulucitas already had a new life. The pretty reporter and her Hermit Crab contact were behind the curve. Rather Barb now had to figure out where, in this renewal, could she fit all her old guilt? Whoever she’d become here in Naples, a good witch who
guided her family to the greater truth or a banshee who wailed the end of everything—whoever, she wasn’t the woman she’d been before these lengthening June days, in this reeking city layered like the decades of a rosary, or like a long marriage.

  And Aurora, new in town, was something else again. The priest wasn’t alone in saying that the septuagenarian prankster, always ready for a quick game of cards or Monopoly, Nerf-ball or birds-&-ponies, did the kids some good. She offered a healthy alternative, after a month when their Mama had come across as ever more fire-&-brimstone. Dr. DiPio had told Barbara the same. Of course the old medico was already under Aurora’s spell, the black widow had put him on the menu, but when it came to the children he could still be trusted. He’d fingered his Christopher medal and claimed that the grandmother “increased total sympathy levels.” Nor could Barb fail to notice that, with the mother-in-law around, everyone under twenty-one acted more goofball and agreeable. A couple of times the kids even mounted impromptu performances on the balcony, doing their bit for whoever might still have a camera, down in the piazza. They pretended to be a rock band, and Paul was the surprise star of the performance. The middle child threw in loose-hipped dance moves while his brothers wailed away on air guitar, rather Broadway in his black and white, almost like that choreographer with the Italian name—was it Fosse?

  A day or so after Jay started his job at DiPio’s clinic, Barbara announced that the older boys could go down to the centro with their father, if they cared to pitch in. A “situation” that hadn’t been “compromised,” according to Attaché Roebuck, the clinic was a psychiatric facility for disorders resulting from the earthquake. It was the same jerry-rigged baronial home, its closets made over as offices, to which the doctor had taken the family on the first day after the assault. The place was tailor-made for sneaking off. Boys like Chris and JJ would have no trouble showing up to “pitch in,” and then gallivanting all over the original city. They could set up any assignations they liked. Then there was Jay’s job, another word that belonged in quotes, though Roebuck and the former VP had worked out a position title that wouldn’t damage the resume. Nevertheless, not quite a week after Jay had worked out the deal, the mother announced that Chris and JJ were free to join their father downtown. She used the news to kick off the dinner conversation, while setting out a hefty platter of octopus sautéed with garlic. More than that, declared the newly-fledged Owl, she’d come up with something fun for Paul and the girls to do.