Summers in Supino

by Maria Coletta McLean

  “Radiation every weekday for seven weeks. Burning the throat like that makes swallowing difficult. He won’t be able to eat. He’ll have to be on a liquid diet. If it gets too bad, we’ll hospitalize him and put him on an IV. We’ll have to remove his salivary glands, so he’ll need to carry a bottle of water everywhere he goes.”

  Every weekend in November, Bob combed through his photos from Supino and put them into albums. It took a long time because he’d often pause to say, “Remember this?” Bob and my father sitting at the kitchen table, eating watermelon and spitting the seeds out the back door into the ravine; Bob and my father on the balcony hanging a clothesline; Kathryn and me sitting on the front steps writing postcards; Kathryn and Davide on the motorcycle; Angela in her kitchen window; Benito with plants in hand; Joe at our front door with a basket of eggs, with a jug of wine, with a bowl of figs; Peppe with a basket of hazelnuts from the mountain; Joe and Bob and Benito hanging decorations for the Feast of San Lorenzo.

  Who was the saint that people prayed to for good health?

  My book edits arrived. I started reading the suggestions and after a few minutes, I put the pages down.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I said. “It’s too many things to consider. There are hundreds of pages and corrections on every one.”

  “One page at a time,” said Bob.

  “Look at this page, for example. She suggests moving this paragraph, cutting this whole line and she wants to know the relationship between us and the cousins who live on the farm.”

  “Okay,” said Bob. “So one paragraph at a time.”

  An envelope came from Peppe. Inside were two photographs of Supino taken from high up on the mountain and showing the village laid out below, all terra cotta roofs and winding streets. Bob got out the magnifying glass. When he found our house, he used the expression that my father had always used: “She looks good.” I was glad we’d spent the extra money to have our roof retiled with authentic terra cotta tiles instead of the new plastic ones that were starting to show up on rooftops here and there in Supino. The terra cotta tiles aged beautifully, their colours fading through the decades. When we climbed up the streets of old Supino Centro, where the houses dated back hundred of years, we could stop and look down on the wonderful patchwork of rooftops.

  One time when we were walking the winding streets, Bob said, “Did you ever consider that we might have ended up buying a house in this old part of town?” We’d bought our house, sight unseen, with only a description from my cousin Johnny saying that he’d been in the house once and it had three rooms, a fireplace, and was located just up from the water fountain. A lot of houses were crammed into the streets just up from the water fountain.

  “We could have bought one of these places,” said Bob, looking at the houses that hugged the mountainside, the flat roof of one house doubling as a patio for the one above. Some houses had a wide windowsill or doorway where the owner kept potted plants or a motor scooter. There were serpentine paths chiselled between the rocks. Narrow steps ran parallel to the houses. Every available recess was filled with a dwelling: one room, two rooms, and, if you were fortunate, a third room perched above. A recess too small for a house might contain a garden, a clothesline, and a wooden chair. If we’d bought here, we’d have had to park at the piazza centrale and carry everything up the winding pathways.

  “Imagine bringing in the furniture or even the firewood,” said Bob. “Thank goodness for Camillo.”

  “Who’s Camillo?”

  “The donkey who carries the supplies.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “You know,” said Bob, using that circular Supinese hand motion.

  The surgery was now scheduled for the second week in December: Bob would be home for Christmas and able to start radiation in the new year. Our son Ken had come up from Ohio to help out at the coffee company and Kathryn had taken a leave from her university classes. They said they’d take care of the business and I could take care of Bob and the book edits. We all said that everything would be fine.

  The day before the surgery, the doctor said, “Don’t come to the hospital and sit in the waiting room all day. It’s a 12-hour operation. Come later, around five.”

  We were in the waiting room by nine. There were a few other groups. Toward 11 o’clock, a woman approached the waiting-room volunteer to complain. “The doctors said they’d be done by 10:30 and they’d come out and tell us how things went. It’s almost 11. What’s going on?”

  The volunteer tried to calm the woman by explaining that surgery can begin a little late, there can be small complications, that the doctor would be out as soon as possible, and the woman needed to stay calm.

  “Complications?” said the woman. “Late? Calm? You try staying calm when your father’s in surgery. They said 10:30 and . . .”

  The volunteer had to call security. Security had to take the woman outside.

  I said to my children, “We’re not going to behave like that.”

  At noon we were discussing lunch, but no one wanted to leave. Ken finally said, “I’ll go and pick up some sandwiches. Nothing’s going to happen during the next half hour.” As soon as Ken left, the doctor arrived. It was too early for news. Only four hours had passed. They’d said 11 or 12 hours. It had to be bad news. Had the cancer spread so far they couldn’t remove it?

  “The surgery’s going well,” the doctor said. “My colleague has taken over the next shift and I’ll be back in at four. We need you to sign permission for us to graft a vein from Bob’s leg in case we need to remove the vein near his eye.”

  I explained it all to Ken when he returned with lunch.

  “Remove the vein near his eye?” said Ken.

  “I know,” I said, but I didn’t. I’d heard the doctor, but I hadn’t envisioned the wait and I hadn’t visualized how Bob would look afterwards. At five o’clock, the volunteer said the waiting room was closing.

  “But my husband’s still in surgery,” I said. “You can’t close. Where are we going to go?”

  “There’s a waiting room on the fourth floor, at the end of the intensive care unit. You can wait there. Your husband will be in recovery for a while before they move him to step-down.”

  “What’s step-down?”

  “The area between intensive care and a regular room.”

  I thought of it as limbo, someplace between heaven and hell where people lingered while their fate was decided. We went to the new waiting room. It was heading to nine o’clock and we were watching the elevator every time the bell rang, hoping it was a stretcher and hoping Bob was on it.

  A stretcher arrived. An old man with a thin face sat up on one elbow and looked around anxiously. As soon as he saw me, his face relaxed, he smiled a big lopsided smile, and I realized it was Bob. The incision was terribly long and held together with dozens of giant silver staples; the left side of Bob’s face was deflated as if his cheek had caved in and the deflation continued right down his neck and into his left shoulder. He lifted his right arm and waved.

  Bob was home for Christmas and back at the hospital every weekday in January for radiation. We missed the Supino Social Club polenta festival. “Next year,” I said. “By then they’ll have an outdoor permit.”

  A cardboard tube arrived in our mailbox. Inside was a note from Joe: “Your cousin told me you had an operation, Bob. Get better soon and come back to Supino.” And a charcoal sketch of the polenta pots set up over open fires in front of the Church of San Nicola.

  “Let’s frame it,” I said. “We can hang it in the dining room.”

  “Next year, I want to be there,” said Bob. “Joe said he’d get me on the committee of men who stir the polenta pots.”

  “You don’t even like polenta.”

  “But I like the sausages that they serve with the polenta.”

  I’d heard the word radiation with
out ever thinking about what it actually was. In Bob’s case, it meant that the radiologist would burn Bob’s throat five times a week and Bob would have a permanent sore throat. “Like strep throat that never gets better,” said the doctor. “Until the radiation ends in seven weeks.”

  Bob and I went to the first treatment together, but after that he said he’d drive himself. I wanted to set up a schedule for people eager to help and let our friends and family take turns driving Bob to his radiation appointments.

  “It will give people a chance to spend some time with you,” I said.

  “That’s not how I want to spend time with people,” said Bob.

  So Bob drove himself, fitting the radiation appointments into his daily schedule as if they were just another entry on the day’s to-do list. During those seven weeks he stopped in to visit existing coffee customers, set up new ones, and kept his radiation appointments at Princess Margaret Hospital. He stopped at the gift shop on the way out, only now, instead of buying himself a chocolate bar, he bought a bottle of water.

  The weekends were a little easier because there were two days without radiation. We were on the same seven-week deadline: I had to finish the edits and he had to finish the radiation. Often on a Sunday afternoon, I’d read parts of the book to Bob, and sometimes, when I looked up, he’d be fast asleep. Soon he couldn’t swallow anything but liquid, and then even liquids were too painful. He lost 30 pounds. At the end of the sixth week, we hosted a little birthday celebration for Bob’s dad, and Bob’s throat was so sore he couldn’t swallow the cake or the ice cream. As his parents were leaving, his father commented that there was only one more week of radiation, and Bob said, “I can’t do it anymore.”

  His father said, “You have to do it. What’s the alternative?”

  Bob finished the radiation in March, one week before the wedding celebration for the daughter of one of the Supino Social Club executives.

  The day that we dressed for the wedding, I noticed that his shirt was too big around the neck. When Bob tightened his tie, the tie puckered his shirt collar. We had to put two new holes in his good leather belt. When Bob put on his jacket, it looked like he’d borrowed someone else’s suit.

  “I look like some sort of clown,” said Bob.

  “You look great,” I said.

  “Great if I was impersonating a scarecrow,” said Bob.

  After the wedding ceremony, outside the church, people offered their congratulations to the bride and groom and then they came to shake hands with Bob. That was the first day that Bob was able to swallow his food and he ate course after course and still lined up with the other guests to tackle the midnight dessert buffet.

  Bob went for his follow-up oncology appointment and the prognosis was good. The second one was even better. He regained the lost weight. He did his exercises to rebuild the muscles in his left arm and shoulder. We got used to his sunken cheek and shrivelled neck and sloping shoulder.

  Davide came to Toronto that summer for a two-week visit. As soon as he arrived, he telephoned his father. I heard him assure Peppe that Bob was well. After that first day, we saw very little of him. He and Kathryn would take off after breakfast and be gone for most of the day. They went to the museum and the art gallery and Kensington Market and Queen Street West and the Harley-Davidson motorcycle shop and the movies. He called home to Supino on Sundays to speak to his father and sister. It was raining the day Kathryn took him back to the airport.

  My Father Came from Italy was launched in October, so instead of helping Peppe with his chestnut harvest, Bob was sitting in the front row and I was reading from my book. Members from the Toronto Supino Social Club came to the event at the Columbus Centre; the women brought baskets of homemade biscuits and cookies. I found out there were Supino Social Clubs in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, and Sudbury; they all invited me to come and read from my book. Every reading and signing through the fall and winter, Bob was in the front row. In the spring, the book was published in the States, where there were even more Supino Social Clubs, and my American publicist set up a book tour for September starting in New York. We booked a trip to Supino for July and August. I packed a few copies of the book in my suitcase.

  Bob went to his last doctor’s appointment the same week we left for Supino. “I don’t have to go back for three months,” he reported. “And after that appointment, six months, and then I don’t have to go back for a year.”

  Usually we arrived in the village in the mid-afternoon, but that July we had a series of delays at the airport and the car rental, and we’d stopped to eat at the auto grill. The sun was dropping toward Santa Serena, sending shadows down the street, when we finally arrived in the village. As we drove up the main street, I checked my watch. It was barely six o’clock.

  “Why are all these stores closed?”

  “Festa?”

  “I don’t think so. The Kennedy Bar was open, but the greengrocer’s closed and the wool shop. Wait a minute, wasn’t there a little gift store there beside the barber?”

  We stopped at the red light on the hill. The windows of the hardware store were papered with yellowed newspapers. Next door, the shoe store’s window was empty except for a sign that said, “For Lease.”

  As we drove through the tunnel and up the hill toward our street, we saw that the pizza store was open but the greengrocer that used to be there was gone.

  Bob slowed down to wave to Benito, who was sitting on the bench with some friends, and Benito motioned for us to stop. The men came to the car window to shake Bob’s hand. They hid their surprise when they saw Bob’s sunken face, and patted his shoulder. “Welcome back,” they said. “Welcome home.”

  A truck pulled up behind us and beeped; Cristina from the tabacchi store came out and waved the vehicle past. Then she and her customer came to shake Bob’s hand. Alfredo and Carlo, the mechanic, walked down the street to see what was going on. A few minutes and a few more handshakes passed before we were able to drive up our street. Mario’s rosemary hedge had grown so fat that I had to close my window before Bob pulled the car up tight against the fence. When we got to the house, Peppe was waiting by his front door. He said, “Hello, Bob. I speak English. How are you, my friend?”

  “You speak English!” said Bob.

  “I speak English. How are you, my friend?” repeated Peppe.

  “Bene,” said Bob. “Molto bene.”

  Peppe had helped Bob to unload the suitcases from the trunk onto the roadway and now he lifted one to carry to the house, but Bob took the case. “Posso,” Bob said. I can do it.

  “Okay,” said Peppe, using the last of his English words. He waited until Bob was climbing the stairs before he asked me, “Bob okay?”

  Now it was my turn to use the Italian words I’d memorized in anticipation of the neighbours’ questions about Bob’s face, starting with the word cancer. I said that the operation was successful and the radiation should prevent the cancer from returning, and the doctors could even reconstruct his face next year with surgery, if Bob wanted.

  “Basta,” said Peppe, shaking his head. That had been Bob’s reaction as well. He’d had enough surgery. But I’d noticed that Bob avoided having his photo taken now and he’d told me that he’d taught himself to shave without looking in the mirror, so I thought he might change his mind on the reconstruction.

  By now Joe had come out of his garage to shake Bob’s hand.

  “Today’s the festival for grandparents,” said Joe. “There’s a troupe of street performers from Rome coming. I’m going down to decorate a little bit.” He had a roll of plastic flags under his arm. “You coming?” he asked, pointing to the water fountain just down the street from our house.

  “Let me get the rest of this stuff inside first,” said Bob.

  As usual, Angela had rearranged our furniture after she’d cleaned our house. This time the kitchen table and chairs were in the living room
under the disco light and the chesterfield was in the kitchen, pushed up in front of the patio door. I took down the calendar that Angela had hung above the fireplace. It had a photo of a suburban mall with an address in the next village.

  “What the heck is Ferentino Mall?” I said.

  “Just leave it,” said Bob. “We can move the rest later.”

  We headed down to the corner. At the tabacchi store, Cristina had opened her cantina doors. Inside, women were making prosciutto and porchetta sandwiches, and stacking them in pyramids on the table. Joe and Benito had a bar set up beside the water fountain where they were pouring wine for the adults and iced tea for the kids. “All free,” said Joe.

  Soon there was a crowd sitting in a circle of plastic lawn chairs, eating, drinking, and listening to the music coming from the speakers on someone’s balcony. Many of the villagers came to shake Bob’s hand. I thought some of these well-wishers were strangers, but Bob identified them all for me: the street sweeper, the butcher’s brother visiting from Aliquippa, the man who owned the photography shop, the shepherd that he often met at the water fountain in the afternoons when I was sleeping and he was getting water, the woman who roasted the chickens down at the Kennedy Bar, the man from Rome who was renovating the highest house in Supino Centro, and the man in the grey fedora who owned the donkey, Camillo, who carried construction supplies up to that house.

  Plastic flags fluttered in the breeze and there was a feeling of expectancy. We heard a drum as it echoed through the narrow street, the sound coming from near the Bar Italia. But instead of a drummer, a prince in a purple cape ran up the street. He swirled into the centre of the circle and, with a booming voice that matched the sound of the drum, began telling the crowd a story about a princess and a dragon. The children cheered when he mentioned the dragon. He lifted his sceptre and twirled it a few times. Flames burst out one end. The prince swallowed the flames and held out his fiery sceptre to the crowd.