“Roman has to do something for Christmas,” Gram says, pushing the door to the vestibule open. “He’d liven things up.”
“Just what we need.”
Gram goes into the kitchen to make us a dish of spaghetti marinara for dinner. I climb the stairs to take the Christmas decorations out of storage in my mother’s old bedroom closet. I flip on the small bedside lamp and pull cardboard cartons full of ornaments out of the closet and stack them on the bed. Boxes labeled SHINY BRIGHT are filled with vintage gold-glass teardrops, and silver, green, red, and blue balls embossed with stripes or flocking, each loaded with meaning and memory.
The old Roma lights, oversize bulbs of ruby red, navy blue, forest green, and taxicab yellow, are the only lights my sisters allow on Gram’s tree. Tess and Jaclyn may have the small, mod twinklers in their own homes, but here at Gram’s, the tree has to be exactly as we remember it: a live blue spruce loaded with smoky glass ornaments that have been around since my mother was a girl. We cherish the ornaments that are a little the worse for wear, the felt reindeer with an eye missing, the plastic choirboys in faded red flannel cassocks, and the tinfoil-star tree topper that Alfred made in kindergarten.
The bed is now covered in boxes. I look for the extension cord with the foot pedal for turning the tree lights on and off. I can’t find it. “Gram?” I holler from the top of the stairs.
“What is it?” She appears on the landing a flight below.
“Where are the extension cords?”
“Look in my room. Check my dresser. It’s got to be in one of those drawers,” she says, heading into the kitchen.
I flip on the light in Gram’s room. Her perfume lingers in the air, freesia and lilies, the same scent that you catch when Gram pulls off her scarf or hangs up her coat.
I pull open her dresser drawer and search for the extension cords. Gram is a pack rat, like me. Her drawers are well-organized but are filled with stuff. The top drawer holds stacks of her lingerie anchored by stockings still in their packages. I lift them carefully, looking for the cords.
An unopened bottle of Youth Dew perfume sits on top of a stack of pressed antique handkerchiefs, which she still uses in evening bags on special occasions. I lift out a box of lightbulbs in their flimsy carton. Searching under it, I find a shoe box of receipts, which I carefully place back where I found it.
I look in the second drawer. Her wool cardigans are folded neatly. In an open plastic bin, there’s a flashlight, a bottle of holy water from Lourdes, and an envelope marked “Mike’s report cards.”
I open the last drawer. Gram’s purses and evening bags are neatly stacked in felt bags. I lift a cigar box filled with small metal gizmos, wheels, latches, and hook replacements for repairing the machines in the shop. Under the box, there’s a black velvet pouch lying flat against the bottom of the drawer. I pull out a heavy gold picture frame.
Inside is a picture of Gram from about ten years ago. The background is unfamiliar and rural. Gram stands next to an olive tree with a man who is not my grandfather. She must be in the hills of Italy. The man has thick white hair brushed to the side, crackling slate blue eyes, and a wide smile. His skin is golden, as is hers, tawny with summer.
The hills behind them are in full bloom with sunflowers. The man has his arm around Gram’s waist, and she is looking down, smiling. I quickly shove the photograph into the pouch and bury it at the bottom of the drawer with the small box of machine parts on top of it. I see the cord for the Christmas lights hidden in the far corner. “I found it!” I call out to her. I close the drawer carefully and turn out the light.
“Maybe it’s one of her cousins,” Tess whispers as we wait for my parents to arrive in the vestibule of Our Lady of Pompeii Church on Carmine Street for Christmas Eve mass. Garlands of fresh greens hang from the columns leading to the altar, covered with gold-foil pots of red poinsettias. A series of small trees with tiny white lights forms a backdrop for the ornate gold tabernacle.
“He didn’t look like a cousin.”
Gram is seated inside, with the grandkids and Alfred, Pamela, Jaclyn, and Tom, while Tess and I wait for our parents while they park.
“Who could it be?”
“It looked romantic to me.”
“Oh, come on! You’re talking about our grandmother.”
“Older people have relationships.”
“Not Gram.”
“I don’t know. She gets a lot of phone calls from Italy, and remember what she said to Keely Smith about having a boyfriend.”
“She didn’t say she had one. She was just playing along for the show. Gram is not the type,” Tess insists.
“The picture is hidden in a velvet pouch in her dresser, like it matters.”
“Okay, I’ll tell you what. When we go back, you keep her busy in the kitchen and I’ll go up and check it out. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“It’s a mob scene out there,” Dad says as he and Mom enter the church.
Tess, Mom, and Dad follow me to the side aisle. We squeeze in next to Charlie and the girls. Gram sits on the far end of the pew, next to Alfred. She leans forward and checks to make sure every member of our family is in place. She smiles happily as she surveys the lot of us before turning her eyes back to the altar. Maybe Tess is right. Gram is not the type to have a life outside of the family she loves. She’s eighty years old. That ship has definitely sailed.
Gram’s kitchen was designed with holidays and the preparation of big meals in mind, so there is no such thing as too many chefs in this kitchen. The long marble counter is a crack workstation, while the fully loaded galley kitchen can accommodate several of us as we reheat and arrange the platters. Christmas Eve dinner is exactly as it was when we were kids, except now, instead of Gram doing all the cooking, we pot-luck the food.
Gram made her traditional wedding soup with spinach and mini meatballs made of veal, Tess brought her homemade manicotti, Mom roasted a loin of pork with sweet potatoes, and prepared a second entrée of breaded chicken cutlets with steamed asparagus. Jaclyn made the salad. I’m in charge of the starters, which feature the traditional seven fishes: smelts, shrimp, sardines, oysters, baccala, lobster, and scungilli.
“What did Clickety Click bring for dessert?” Tess asks after looking around and making sure Pamela is out of earshot.
“They went to DeRoberti’s,” I tell her. Pamela brought cookies, cannolis, and mini cheesecakes, but we don’t mind the store-boughts, because at least she goes to a great Italian bakery.
“It’s Christmas and I want peace in the valley,” Mom says firmly.
“Sorry, Mom,” Tess apologizes.
“Never mind you. Look at my chicken cutlets,” Mom says proudly as she arranges them on a platter. “I pound them until they are as thin as paper. Before I bread them, you can see right through them. Jaclyn, your salad looks delish.”
“It’s from my Nigella Lawson cookbook,” Jaclyn says. “I figure with the name Nigella, she’s got to have some Italian in her, right? We got her entire collection at our wedding.”
“Her entire collection? Is that all?” Gram asks as she joins us in the kitchen. “When I got married, there was only one cookbook given to brides.”
“And now I have it. Ada Boni’s The Talisman.” Mom garnishes the cutlets with spikes of fresh parsley.
“It’s the best. Whenever I make Charlie meatballs, recipe number two, out of that book, he’ll do whatever I want. I made them last month and he retiled the half bath.”
“Well, at least you know what motivates him,” I tell Tess.
“You know, I try to do what Ma did when we were growing up. A fresh, home-cooked meal every night and dinner with the family. Not easy to pull off these days.”
“Thank you for acknowledging my contribution. I hoped my children would appreciate the little things I did and the big meals I prepared. I think Saint Teresa of the Little Flower said it best, ‘Do small things in a big way,’ or was it ‘Do big things in a small way’? I can’t remember. D
oesn’t matter. I worked hard all of my life”—Mom lifts the steamer full of asparagus off the stove, removes the lid, and lifts the asparagus out with tongs—“inside my home. I don’t like the delineation of career in the office versus homemaking. Work is work. And I worked for my family, to the exclusion of my own goals. You four children were my job. My performance evaluation came when each of you graduated from college and fled the nest able to take care of yourself. I gave up my own life, but I’m not complaining. It’s just the way it was. And by the way, it was fabulous!” Mom places the platter on the table.
When we were growing up, my friends would tell me that their moms would threaten them into behaving by saying things like, “I hope your children ruin your life the way you’ve ruined mine!” or “If you don’t shape up, I’ll kill myself and then what will you do, you little bastards!” or “This time next year I’ll be dead, so you can go ahead and have your pot parties!” Mom never said anything of the like to us. She would never threaten suicide because she’s a genuine life junkie.
No, when Mom really wanted to scare us, she’d say, “That’s it! I’ve had it! I’ll go out and get a job! You heard me! A job! Then you’ll see what it’s like with no mother around here to wait on you hand and foot!” Or the big jab delivered loud and singsongy, “I’m going back to work!” Never mind that my mother never had a job outside our home. She graduated from Pace with a teaching degree and never used it. “When would I have gone back into the classroom?” she used to say. “When?” As if the classroom were this mythical place that swallowed women with teaching certificates whole in the land that time forgot.
The truth is, my mother had other plans. She was busy building Roncalli Incorporated. She had Alfred ten months after she married Dad. Then Tess was born, followed by me, and finally Jaclyn, and we became her high-powered career. Lee Iacocca had nothing on my mother. Motherhood was her IBM, her Chrysler, and her Nabisco. She was the CEO of our family. She woke early every morning, “put on her face,” and dressed like she was going into an office. Mom made lists, organized six lives on a giant eraser-board calendar, got us to and from wherever we needed to be, and never complained, well, not much. One year for Christmas, we made up business cards for her that said:
MICHELINA “MIKE” RONCALLI
Mother Extraordinaire
Available 24/7
Forest Hills, Queens, New York, USA
She was so proud of those cards she handed them out to strangers, like she was running for borough president. She could’ve handled that job, too, believe me. Mom is a born leader, a taskmaster and a visionary. She also toots her own horn, which doesn’t hurt in politics.
“How are the boys doing on the roof?” Gram brings the soup bowls to the counter.
“I’ll check.” I head up the stairs to the roof.
“And call the kids please,” Mom calls after me. “We’re ready.”
I climb the stairs two at a time to the third floor. I do a quick check of the bedrooms. I stop and check the clock in Gram’s room. Where is Roman? He said he’d be here fifteen minutes ago. Now I’m worried Tess and Jaclyn are beginning to think he’s a phantom. I put it out of my mind; he’ll be here.
The kids are scattered everywhere, playing dress up and hide-and-seek, or maybe Charisma is calling Japan like she did the last time she was here (twenty-three bucks on the long-distance bill). Whatever they’re up to, no one appears to be bleeding or crying so I breeze past them and go up to the roof.
The men are in charge of preparing a fire in the charcoal grill on the roof. After dinner, we bundle up in our coats and head to the roof to roast marshmallows. This was my grandfather’s Christmas chore, and it’s not lost on us that it takes Dad, Alfred, Charlie, and Tom to do what Grandpop did by himself.
I step out onto the roof and into the cold night air to check the grill. The charcoals are still black, their edges turning deep red. In an hour, they’ll be just the right temperature for the marshmallow roast. A swirl of gray smoke rises from the fire as Alfred holds court in his Barneys topcoat.
My brother points to buildings on the West Side Highway. He’s conducting what sounds like a tutorial on real estate, with Pamela at his side shivering in a fur capelet. Charlie, Tom, and my father listen carefully, rapt at his knowledge. He points to a building on the corner of Christopher Street. He rattles off the asking price, followed by the recent sale price, like he’s reciting the names of his children. I stand in the cold long enough to hear him drop some big numbers.
“Dinner is ready,” I interrupt.
“Do you need any help down in the kitchen?” Pamela asks.
“We’re okay.” I smile at her. “Could you help corral the kids?”
“Sure.” She follows me down the stairs. I almost ran to the Home Depot on Twenty-third Street and bought those rubber step guards because I knew Pamela was coming and I was afraid she’d take a tumble off those five-inch stilettos and somersault down three flights of stairs, winding up in the workshop in a bloody heap.
“I like your dress, Pamela,” I tell her, genuinely admiring her red silk-shantung shift with a matching bolero and red ankle-strap sandals. “You look as young as you did the day you met my brother.”
She blushes. “Your brother told me that change was nonnegotiable.”
“What?”
“Well, he said, no matter what, he didn’t want me to change from the day he met me.”
“Isn’t that sort of impossible?”
“Well, maybe. But I’m trying to keep up my end of the deal. Plus, his eyesight keeps getting worse, so it all evens out.”
As Pamela gathers the kids for dinner, I return to the kitchen. Mom, Gram, and my sisters place garnishes on the platters for the Christmas Eve Feast of the Seven Fishes. I’m about to tell my sisters about Alfred’s No Change Clause and kvetch about how controlling our brother can be, but decide not to. Pamela, after all, is only doing what we tried to do for all these years—make Alfred happy. If that means she has to wear her jeans from 1994 and fit into them for the rest of her life, so be it. I feel sorry for my sister-in-law. When I picture Pamela at family parties, I see her on the outside, peeking through twists of crepe-paper streamers as if they’re prison bars. She never participates at weddings when we form a soul-train dance line, or joins the card games we throw together after Sunday dinner. She sits in a corner and reads a magazine. She’s just not one of us.
The buzzer sounds.
“Are we expecting someone?” Mom asks.
“Who could it be? Last-minute FedEx?” Tess teases, looking at me, knowing full well that I’ve been waiting for Roman to arrive so I can put him on display like the radish rosettes in the crudité dish. “A testy bride maybe?”
“On Christmas Eve? Never,” Gram answers. “Or any other day, for that matter.”
“It’s probably June. You invited her, didn’t you, Gram?” Jaclyn plays along with Tess; after all, it’s Christmas, so let’s have some fun with Funnyone.
“She’s with her wild East Village friends eating a seitan turkey and smoking weed,” Gram says and shrugs. “You know those show people.”
I press the button on the monitor. “Who is it?”
“Roman.”
“Come on up,” I say cheerfully into the intercom. I turn to my sisters. “Behave yourselves.”
Tess claps her hands together. “Your boyfriend! We’re finally going to meet him!”
“I wonder what he’s like!” Jaclyn trills.
“Girls, let’s not put pressure on Valentine.” Fully aware of the power of the first impression, my mother checks her lipstick in the chrome reflection of the toaster. Then she adjusts her posture, throws back her shoulders, lifts her neck, and parts her lips ever so slightly to show off a shallow dimple in her left cheek. Now she’s ready to meet my boyfriend.
Roman comes into the kitchen carrying a large baking pan covered in foil and then Saran Wrap. He wears a tailored black cashmere overcoat that I’ve never seen before. “I thou
ght you could use dessert. Cobbler. Merry Christmas,” he says.
I give Roman a kiss. “Merry Christmas.”
I take the pan from Roman and place it on the counter. He unbuttons his coat and hands it to me. “You look pretty,” he says softly in my ear.
“Introduce us please, Valentine.” Mom looks Roman up and down like she’s studying the statue of David on a group tour. She actually goes up on her toes, craning for a better look at him.
“Ciao, Teodora.” He kisses both of Gram’s cheeks before turning to shake my mother’s hand.
“This is my mother, Mike.”
“Merry Christmas, Mrs. Roncalli,” he says warmly.
My mother offers her cheeks, and Roman picks up on her cue and gives her the European double-kiss action, too. “Please call me Mom. I mean Mike. Welcome to our Christmas celebration.”
“This is my sister Tess.”
“You have two daughters, right?” Roman asks as Tess extends her hand and he shakes it.
“Yes, I do.” Tess is impressed that the stranger has retained any biographical information about her whatsoever.
“And this is my baby sister, Jaclyn.”
“The newlywed?”
“Yes.” Jaclyn shakes his hand and squints at him like she’s surveying stew meat in the butcher department at D’Agostino’s.
“Well, Roman, what did you make for us?” Mom bats her eyelashes at him.
“It’s a cobbler of blackberry and fig,” he says, just as I hear my niece pipe up from the stairs.
“Who’s that guy?” Charisma points at Roman.
“Charisma. Come over here and say hello.” Tess looks at Roman. “I’m sorry. She’s seven. She hates all boys. This is Aunt Valentine’s friend.”
Charisma squints at him. “Aunt Valentine doesn’t have friends.”
“Well, not in a long time, but now she does and we’re all happy for her,” my mother explains as I contemplate jumping headfirst out of the kitchen window.
“We’re just about to sit down to dinner.” Mom makes a sweeping gesture with her arm toward the table. My mother’s body language shifts from slight wariness to full receptivity of Roman Falconi. “You must meet my husband and the boys.”