The Deep End of the Ocean

  “Patrick, tesoro mio,” said Grandma Rosie, who was getting his dad coffee. “She’s not herself. You must give her time.”

  “I have no more time, Ma!” Vincent realized, to his terror, that his dad was crying. “I want to have a life, Ma, not this…prison on Post Road that Beth never goes out of—I mean, not willingly, just up and down to her darkroom…. Ma, I want out of this!”

  Grandma Rosie swiveled her head around, fast, and then said in a big voice, meant for Vincent’s dad, too, “Vincenzo, carissimo! Grandma will come and see you in a minute.”

  Grandpa Angelo carried Vincent outside, set him down in one of the white iron chairs, and brought him a glass of orange juice. “In a little while, we’ll have pasta, eh? But first, we give your daddy some time with Grandma.”

  “Daddy’s crying,” said Vincent.

  “He’s so sad, ’Cenzo,” said Grandpa Angelo, sitting himself down heavily in the chair opposite. He started flicking through the tapes on his bench, next to his big tape player. “We must have some music now, eh?”

  “Why?”

  “Good for the soul!” said Grandpa.

  “No—Daddy. Why’s he sad?”

  “He’s sad because of your brother, dear one. He’s missing Ben.”

  “And he hates my mommy. She said.”

  “No, Vincenzo, your daddy loves your mommy. He loves her since he was a little boy like you. She’s his best buddy.”

  “I think Rob is his best buddy.”

  “Well, she’s his best buddy and his true love. It’s just…here!” said Grandpa, finding a tape. “It’s just she’s so sad and he’s so sad, they forget their love.”

  “Mom forgot my school conference three times. The principal had to call. And then Dad went.”

  “Well, you see then. This is so hard a time for us. For me, too. I think of my Ben and it crushes my heart.” He patted his leg and Vincent came to sit on his lap. “Do you ever get sad, ’Cenzo?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “Today was once. They were fighting and they…they scared Kerry. She yelled.”

  “I used to get sad when I was a little boy,” said Grandpa. “I would get sad so many times because I missed my papa. I’ve showed you pictures of my papa, Vincent. He was such a big man…so big and loud…and he sang the Neapolitan love songs, with the voice of a Titian angel, my father. You know, that is why you are named Vincenzo, after him. And Paul, after your mama’s brother Paulie.”

  “And what about my daddy?”

  “What about him?”

  “Is he named after somebody?”

  “Yes,” said Grandpa Angelo. “And this is another story about sadness. When your papa was born, I was on the road, selling cooking things. This was before we had our business, long before. I was far away, and I couldn’t get home; and Grandma Rosie was just a young girl, having her first baby. The nurse who cared for her was from another country, like us—she was from Ireland. And when Grandma Rosie was frightened and sad, and crying out for me, this nurse—I think she was called Bridget, they’re all called Bridget—prayed for Saint Patrick to ease her and bring forth a good baby. And Saint Patrick did do this. So, though this is an Irish name, this is the name Grandma Rosie gave your daddy.”

  “Where was he?”

  “Who? Your daddy?”

  “No, your daddy, when you were missing him?”

  “He died, Vincent. He died in the first of the World War. He was a cook—all us Cappadoras, we cook, eh? But the bad guys attacked the camp, and your great-grandpa was shot, and he died right there, right where he was. He was buried there, too, not at home. I never saw his grave.” Grandpa Angelo looked hard out at the grape arbor near the backyard fence. “And my mama, she had to clean houses, we were so tired and so poor. We missed my papa, and we were forbidden to say his name, because it would break my mama’s heart. And that’s when I discovered the opera. There was a teacher at the school in our village, and he had the record player, and he would play the operas and tell us to close our eyes and imagine what the places they were singing about looked like. The words sounded funny to me then, Vincenzo, because they were all so sad! So sad I thought they were silly; I was only a young boy, not even as old as you yet. In La Bohème, he was singing, ‘Your tiny hand is frozen,’ and I thought, How silly. And yet—and yet, the music was so magnificent!…The only true opera is Italian, Vincenzo. You know this. Like the only true food. We have to be nice to all the other people, and say, ‘Oh yes, oh yes, this Mexican food is very good,’ but we know better, eh?”

  “Yup,” said Vincent. “We know better.”

  “And so, when I was a grown man, and I, too, was a soldier, I was very afraid that I would die. This is in the second of the World Wars. I am an American soldier now, an American citizen, fighting against the evil of my own nationals, and the Japs—mostly for me the Japs, on the islands in the Pacific Ocean.” Vincent leaned harder against his grandpa’s chest, trying to picture his round, brown, white-haired grandpa thin and young like his dad, and scared, like his dad. “I was so afraid, I’d get this record player, which I bought, and I’d play the music. La Traviata. Not the Germans, not their pig music. The real opera. And it would make me happier and not so scared.”

  “How could it make you happier when it was so sad?”

  “That’s what I’m going to show you,” said Grandpa Angelo, and he turned on the tape. There was a lady singing; she was singing pretty loud, but you could still tell she was about to start crying. The words were all jumbled up, like the singing on the tapes in Cappadora’s.

  “What’s she saying, Grandpa? What’s she talking in? Italian?”

  “Yes, Italiano, Vincent. Just listen.”

  But Vincent proudly repeated the only words he knew in Italian besides bambino and some swears: “Non parlo Italiano.”

  “I know, but listen. I will tell you what she says. The singer is Mirella Freni, a great star. She’s older now, but she was very young when this recording was made. She’s talking to her little boy and she’s saying, ‘Tu, tu piccolo iddio’—my little god. She loves her little boy and he’s going away, and she’s having a broken heart.”

  “Why’s he running away?”

  “He’s not running away, Vincenzo,” said Grandpa. Vincent could smell the gravy cooking in the house and he was meanly hungry, but he didn’t want to be rude to Grandpa. Even though Grandpa was right about the opera, it did sound a little silly, to call a kid “God.”

  “Why’s she calling him ‘God’?”

  “Because she loves him so much he’s like a…like a saint to her. That’s how parents love their children. That’s how we love your papa. And how your papa loves you and Kerry and Ben. And your mama, too.”

  “So where’s he going?”

  “Who?” said Grandpa, who looked as if he was going to get up and jump around in his joy over the singing lady.

  “The little boy.”

  “His papa is taking him to America. See, the mama, she’s Japanese. Her name is Madama Butterfly. That’s the name of the story. By Puccini. The papa, he’s a bad guy. He fooled the mama and made her think she was his wife, but he got another wife. Very malo, malo. Bad. And now she’s giving her baby to him.”

  “Why, if he’s so bad?”

  “I don’t know, Vincenzo. Because she’s poor, I guess. And because she’s so sad that the papa doesn’t love her that she wants to die. And if she loses her little boy, then she will want to die even more.”

  “My mommy didn’t die,” said Vincent, a throwing-up feeling creeping up. He held Grandpa Angelo tighter.

  “No, no, of course not. If your mommy died, where would she be when Ben comes home? In heaven with the angels?” He kissed Vincent, his chin rough, smelling of his cologne, the heavy, fruity scent of his drawers and closets. “We pray for Ben to come home. And this mama, she’s a Jap, you know, Vincent. The Japs are a crazy people. Pazzi. They think that if somebody does something bad to you, or if you s
crew up, you got to die over it. That’s a crazy thing, Vincent. Regular people, like Italians and even Irish, like Grandpa Bill, they get up and kick somebody in the gool if he does bad to them. They get up and they have tenoots….”

  “What’s tenoots?”

  “Nothing,” said Grandpa. “They have coraggio, they have bravery. They try to fix something.”

  “Eat!” called Grandma Rosie from the back door.

  “Momento!” Grandpa yelled back. “Now, listen to this part, Vincent. This is also sad, though it’s supposed to be happy. This is why opera is so great. There’s a whole story. If you like, I will copy this tape for you, so you can play it at home. In this part—this is the most famous song in the whole thing, it’s called ‘Un bel di.’”

  “What’s that?”

  Grandpa spelled it out for him; it wasn’t spelled like it sounded. “‘One fine day,’ Vincent. She’s singing about how she thinks this jamoke is going to come back to her and her baby and make her happy….”

  The voice was really pretty, and the melody was so pretty. You could tell it was Japanese because of the tune, but it was even prettier than regular Japanese music, which Vincent had heard in school, and which sounded to him like skim milk tasted, like they didn’t have enough instruments to go around. He lay back against Grandpa, and listened to the lady’s heavenly voice, and tried to let his sadness float on it.

  But all he could think of was that his hunger was all gone, and of the way the mama’s voice sounded before, when she was talking to her little boy, who wasn’t even lost yet, but it was as if he was already a million miles away from her, so far she could never hug him again.

  CHAPTER 13

  May 1990

  Under the mangy grape arbor in the backyard, which Vincent’s dad never paid any attention to, though he always said he was going to and yelled if you goofed around with it, Vincent and Alex Shore were starting to set up this whole twig town for the little Playmobil guys to live in. They were big now, almost twelve, and they didn’t really play with that kind of stuff much anymore; mostly, they rode bikes to Radio Shack or goofed around with the hoops at the park. Last night on the phone, they’d cooked up this big plan to use the spool of utility wire Vincent had found. They were going to string it from Vincent’s window to Alex’s, three houses down and across the street, and try to rig up a phone that really worked. But when Vincent’s dad caught him taking out his bedroom screen and found the hammer and nails, he put a stop to the whole thing right away:

  “Are you stupid?” he asked Vincent. “You want to clothesline some kid in a convertible?”

  Which didn’t sound so bad to Vincent, actually.

  But the wire idea going bust kind of meant needing something to do. And it was hot, real hot for the last week of school. The pool wasn’t even open yet. Alex’s mom wouldn’t let them in the house because his brother Max had chicken pox.

  At first they were just going to make some dirt barricades and stuff so the guys could have a war; but Vincent found some twine his father had cut off the tomatoes and showed Alex how Indians used to build wickiup—by tying a whole bunch of same-size sticks together at the top and then bending them out. Then you had a frame. Alex had the idea of using tissue to cover it; but Vincent said, “No, let’s use that plastic wrap stuff, because then we can see what they’re doing in there.”

  “They won’t be doing anything,” Alex said. “Unless we reach in there and move them around.”

  “No, you don’t get what I mean. It’ll be like we can set up little scenes, like one can be the deer-skinning hut or something. It’ll be like a diorama at the Field Museum.” Alex had never been at the Field Museum. “Well, it’s where they have a lot of mummies and stuff, and they have all these dioramas of the hunter-gatherers and the Incas. Like models.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” Alex grumbled. “I just want to have a war is all.”

  “Well, that’s boring and stupid,” Vincent told him. “And anyhow, they’re my guys.” That didn’t sound too good, Vincent thought, and he’d better be careful. Alex was his best friend—pretty much his only friend. On the other hand, he didn’t want to do something really baby and boring like war. “Come on, Al. It’ll be cool,” he said. As Alex thought it over, Kerry came out into the yard, wearing her velvet American Girl dress (she wore it all the time, and it cost like a hundred bucks; it drove Vincent nuts to see her, like, wear it to gymnastics under her jersey; but nobody ever stopped her). Kerry was lugging a big bucket, filled to the top. Vincent caught the high, hottish smell of it right away.

  “Wait a minute,” he told Alex. “Kerry, what’s in that?”

  “The stuff under the sink,” she said, smiling. “I’m going to kill the bugs in the sandbox.” Vincent went over and took the bucket away from her; she started to kick him right away—she was only four, so this really shouldn’t have hurt too much. But she was a good kicker. Vincent had to stand on one of her feet to stop her.

  “Kerry,” he told her, “this is ammonia. It’s poison. You can’t play with it. Where’s mom?”

  “On the telephone.”

  “Did she let you have this?”

  “Yes,” Kerry said. Vincent thought, Well, maybe she did. Oh, well.

  “You can kill box elder bugs better with just plain old dish soap and water in a squirter. And it’s funner.” He dumped the ammonia under Mr. Aberg’s poplars, which Vincent’s dad said were really about half trees of heaven and the other half eyesore. “Do you want me to get you some of that?”

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh!” cried Kerry delightedly.

  “I’m going to go get her something and get some of that clear wrap, okay, Al?” Vincent went back to the grape arbor. “You want a Coke, too?”

  “You’re so damn bossy,” Alex said.

  “Cut it out,” Vincent warned. His hands were balling up; they always did, he couldn’t help it—even teachers knew it.

  “My mom says you’re so bossy because your mom never pays no attention to you.”

  “Any attention to me, Al. She never pays any attention to me.”

  “Well, that’s what she says. And I think she’s right. Your dad is at work all the time and your mom never pays no attention to you.”

  “You know, your mom is dumb, Al.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said. “So?”

  “Adults aren’t supposed to say that stuff where kids can hear them. Your mom would kill you if she knew you told me that.”

  “So?”

  “So, let’s just get this game going, okay? We can have a war and a village of hunters, okay? We can do both.” Alex shrugged. That was okay. He wouldn’t leave if Vincent hurried up.

  He went into the kitchen to snag two Cokes, and right away, even though he couldn’t see her, he noticed how his mother was talking on the phone. Because she was really talking, saying, “Get out of here! How long have you known this?…But when did you really decide?” And then, “But will you even enjoy it?…You have? How many times?” She was laughing. His mother was laughing. He followed the telephone cord around the edge of the breakfast-room wall, and there she was, all coiled up in a chair, twiddling her hair with one finger. When she saw him, she waved at him.

  His mother waved and…grinned.

  Vincent brought the Cokes back outside. Damn it. He had forgotten Kerry’s bug spray. His mother was off the phone, but she was dialing it again. She called to Vincent, “Guess who’s getting married?”

  Vincent was so stunned he dropped the nearly full spritz bottle into the sink; it started to spill down the drain. His mother never spoke to him or anyone else first. He’d done, like, experiments, measuring how long it would take her to say anything if the phone didn’t ring or Kerry didn’t ask her for a cookie or something. And she could go hours, whole days probably. He had personally seen her go a whole day, once when his dad was out of town. She made beds and junk, like a regular person, except she never said one word, didn’t even hum. It wasn’t like she wasn’t paying attention to
him; she just didn’t even see him.

  Vincent didn’t believe she was really thinking nothing; you couldn’t. He and his cousin Moira had tried a whole bunch of times, once, to run around the house just one time without thinking of a pig. You couldn’t do it. A person always thought; you couldn’t drain your brain. In his humble opinion, it was really too much thinking—like static on the radio—getting in his mother’s way. Aunt Tree had once said, when she thought Vincent was asleep, “The light’s on but nobody’s home,” about his mother’s head. But Vincent disagreed. Vincent pictured his mother’s head more like a beehive, sometimes.

  But now she was looking right at him.

  “Candy,” his mom said, and he thought, Does she want some? But then he realized she meant her friend the police lady, the one who sometimes came up for the weekend and let Vincent touch her unloaded gun for just a second, and let him play with her gold shield. “Candy’s going to get married. Can you believe that?”

  Vincent knew something was expected of him. “Well,” he said. “She is pretty old.”

  “Oh, she’s not so old, Vincent,” said his mother. “She’s what…forty, I guess maybe. She wants…she wants a baby before it’s too late.”

  “Too late?” Vincent asked, feigning more interest than he felt, desperate to keep her looking at him this way.

  “Well, women can only have babies for a while. Then they get too old and their bodies don’t work that way anymore.” You mean menopause, Vincent thought—they told them about it in school. He always thought, why was it a pause? Didn’t it really just stop altogether?

  “But that’s when you’re real old, right?” he asked, urgently, feeling his mother start to slip away.

  “Well, but sometimes if you have a baby when you’re old, the baby isn’t right. It has birth defects.” He saw then that she was gone. He could pop out one of his eyeballs right now and she’d say, “Vincent, take that outside.” She turned back to the phone. “I want Laurie to take Kerry for me. Do you want to stay with Daddy? Are you big enough to stay alone till he gets home from work?” She frowned. “I wish Jilly was still around.” Mom was always wishing Jill didn’t get out of school and get married. But Vincent knew this wasn’t one of those questions parents asked that they’d already worked out the answers to. His mother didn’t do that. When she asked whether they had long division in fifth grade, she really had no idea whether he knew what long division was. She had no idea that he’d placed second out of the whole school in the spelling bee, and that the word he missed was “withdrawal.”