“I actually had the time to count each one while Peachy went into detail about the food at the reception. So many courses! And the Venetian dessert table. How many cannoli stuffings are there, anyway?” Mabel removed a few flakes of pink coconut from her collar.
“All brides are nervous and want every detail to fall into place as they dreamed it. And she’s waited a long time for this. So let’s give her some room,” Aunt Jo said evenly. “Let’s say only nice things going forward, shall we, girls?”
The women rode in silence for a few moments. Then Mabel turned to them and said, “The cream cheese sandwiches were quite tasty.”
* * *
Calla stood at the entrance of the Palazzini garage and looked around. “Hello?” she called out. When no one answered, she went inside, where the scent of motor oil and cigar smoke hung in the air. She looked down on the floor, where the numbers 1 through 4 were painted in red, indicating parking spots. She heard the soft staccato of a radio show filter down from the office, so she climbed the stairs.
Hortense was sitting at her desk, studying the Burpee seed catalog, when Calla knocked lightly on the open door.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for Nicky Castone.”
“What for?” Hortense asked without looking up from the delphiniums.
“Business.”
“What kind of business?” Hortense raised her head and peered at Calla over her reading glasses.
“Theatrical.”
“You selling tickets? If you are, he’s too old for the circus.”
“No. Nicky works for me. Well, he did. I fired him. And now I need him back.”
“You got the wrong Nicky.”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve got the right one. He says he works here during the day. He’s a hack. Drives Number 4. About six feet tall. Hair brown on the way to red. Blue eyes. Nice smile. Excellent teeth.”
“Not as good as mine.” Hortense forced a smile.
“You do have beautiful teeth.”
“I know. Can’t take any credit. I come from a long line of hard teeth. And, I brush with baking soda and salt every night faithfully. Mornings too.”
“It’s the old remedies that work best.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
“My name is Calla Borelli,” she said, extending her hand.
“Mrs. Mooney.” Hortense shook her hand.
“At night Nicky works at my theater.”
“He’s an usher?”
“Prompter. But now he’s an actor.”
“He’s in the shows?”
“He understudied a part, and now I need him. The actor that was playing the role is out for the rest of the run. His mother broke her hip.”
“That’s too bad. A broken hip is one slip away from the dirt nap.”
“I’ve heard,” Calla said sadly.
“What do you do?”
“I’m the director.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah. It’s a family business. Not that I need an excuse. Do I need an excuse?”
“No, no. Women work. Look at me. Dispatcher. Morse code operator. That’s right. Western Union. But look around. Rosie the Riveter. She made Sherman tanks. You can do whatever you want. The war changed everything for women. Well, for you.”
“I think so.”
“You may want to leave him a note. He’s on a job. It’s a round robin. He’s taking a fare to New York International.” Hortense handed Calla a pad. She wrote down her information and handed it back.
“Borelli. I wonder if there’s any Italians left in Italy. Do you think they all came to America?”
“I don’t know. Lots of us did. I haven’t been to Italy.”
“It’s an interesting question, though, isn’t it?”
“It is.” Calla felt scrutinized under Hortense’s intense stare. “Is there something wrong? I feel like my slip is hanging or something.”
“No, Miss Borelli, your slip is fine. I’m just looking at you. I do that with folks.”
“It was nice to meet you, Mrs. Mooney.” Calla forced an awkward smile and backed out of the office.
Hortense went to the window and watched Calla as she went down the steps and out of the garage.
* * *
Nicky drove through Ambler, a quiet suburb of Philadelphia, its winding streets paved with fresh macadam and lined with sycamore trees. The green lawns that hemmed the stone houses were more carpet than grass. He let out a low whistle, imagining the price tag of a home in this neighborhood.
He slowed down as he counted the house numbers until he found 17 Mackinaw Street, the home of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Allison. Hortense assigned the airport runs into New York International to Nicky, knowing that the tips were generous and he needed the extra money to save up for his honeymoon. She had done the same for his cousins when they were engaged to be married. Hortense was considerate that way.
Nicky confirmed the Allisons’ address when he saw three tan suitcases lined up on the walkway of a Georgian home whose front door gaped open.
Nicky jumped out of the cab and was loading the luggage into the trunk when a petite blond woman waved urgently at him from the porch.
“Hurry!” she shouted.
Nicky ran up the front walk and into the house.
“There’s something wrong with my husband,” Mrs. Allison exclaimed. Around forty, she wore a navy blue suit and held her hat, a small cloche with a bold white band, in her hand. Her husband sat in a chair, holding his head in his hands.
“Sir?”
The man looked up at Nicky. His eyes were clouded and unfocused.
“We’ll be late for the airplane,” his wife said nervously.
“Your husband needs to go to the hospital.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“We should go right away.”
Nicky helped the man to his feet, assisted him down the walk, and eased him into the backseat of the cab. His wife ran around to the passenger door and jumped in next to her husband.
Nicky put on the emergency lights and peeled through the streets of Ambler as Mrs. Allison shouted directions to the hospital.
Nicky could hear Mrs. Allison gently coaching her husband. “Gary, hold on, we’re almost there,” she said between commands.
Nicky checked his passenger in the rearview mirror. He was slumped over in his wife’s arms.
“Please hurry,” she pleaded.
Nicky pulled out of the line of cars at the red light and sped on the shoulder past them. He was making the turn for the hospital when the wife cried out.
Nicky pulled up to the entrance of the emergency room, jumped out of the car, and ran inside to find a doctor. He came back outside, ran to Mr. Allison’s side of the car, and opened the door.
“Help is on the way,” Nicky said to Mr. Allison, whose wife was crying and patting her husband’s face and hands, trying to rouse him.
“We’re losing him. Gary, wake up,” she said desperately.
Nicky checked the man’s pulse, as he had been trained to do when he was in the army. He touched the man’s neck, one side and then the other, and with the other hand, his wrist. There was barely a flutter.
“Did you find a pulse?” his wife asked.
Nicky closed his eyes to concentrate, to try to feel a faint tap against his fingers.
“Out of the way,” the medic barked. Nicky stepped away from the car as a flurry of hospital staff, including a nurse overseeing the maneuver, transferred the man from the cab to a gurney.
The wife jumped out of the cab, now frantic. She shouted at the medic, as though this turn of events was somehow his fault, asking if he knew what he was doing, as if his skill alone could change the outcome.
A nurse lifted a sheet folded into a triangle from the foot of the gurney. The wind kicked up as she unfurled the sheet in the air. It billowed like immaculate white angel wings against the blue sky.
Nicky heard the flapping of wings over the shouting of the medic, the creaky wheels of t
he gurney, the desperate pleas of the wife, and the firm orders of the nurse. The attempt to save the dying man seemed to be happening under glass. Nicky looked up, searching the sky for the origin of the sound of the wings, but there was nothing but blue.
The wife ran alongside the gurney as the staff pushed it through the doors of Abington Hospital.
Nicky stood in the spot where he had moved to get out of the way of the medic. He did not move until an ambulance arrived and needed the space. He closed the doors of the cab and parked in a spot near the entrance. He removed the Allisons’ luggage from the trunk and carried the suitcases into the hospital. Once inside the hospital, he sat in a chair with a clear view of the doors to the examining rooms and waited. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there, as he hadn’t checked his watch.
All sorts of wounded people came into the hospital as he sat. A woman ran in with her hand wrapped in a bloody dishtowel. A boy around seven, holding an ice pack to his mouth where a baseball had split open his lip, was cradled in his father’s arms. The boy’s mother rushed alongside them, having remembered to put the tooth that was knocked out in a glass of milk, preserving the root. Later still, a woman arrived whose face had drooped with palsy. Her gray skin looked like it was made of wet clay, as though an artist had pinched her face into its odd shape on his way to sculpting something of symmetry and beauty.
The day shift changed to night at the admittance desk before Nicky’s fare, Mrs. Allison, the woman who had not put on her hat, who had not made it to New York International Airport with her husband and suitcases, eventually emerged through the doors. She looked tiny, like a delicate bird made of blown glass, the kind that dangles from a chandelier, so fragile that light might go through it.
Nicky stood, holding his cap.
She went to him. “You waited for me?”
“To see if there was anything I could do.”
“He’s gone.”
Nicky nodded. “I’m sorry. I wish I would have called an ambulance.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered.”
Nicky was surprised. “I don’t understand.”
“When he was a boy, he almost died from scarlet fever. When I met him, it was the first thing he told me. He said, ‘I’m on borrowed time.’ He told me he had a bad heart. We were at a mixer and the band was loud, and I thought he said he had a sad heart and I said I could fix that. He laughed and said, no, a bad heart. And through the years, he’d remind me. And one time, I got impatient with him when we were fussing about something and I said, ‘Everyone is on borrowed time.’ And he said, ‘The difference is, I know it.’ Why didn’t I believe him?”
Mrs. Allison’s sons and her family members pushed through the entrance door and spotted her. They encircled her as she wept and comforted her, and soon, they moved together to go. Nicky handed off the luggage to a neighbor. Mrs. Allison hadn’t noticed, but Nicky knew she would want her husband’s clothing. All of it would matter later. Nicky watched as Mrs. Allison, shored up on both arms by one of her sons, left the hospital. Family is essential; they scoop up their own to rescue them in tragedy, to bind them close, to shore them up and heal them. Those who don’t share their name or their grief or their history are left behind. A witness is only that, a passerby who observes a moment in the landscape of a stranger’s life story. But Nicky had heard the wings, and now the death of Gary Allison was part of his story too.
* * *
Nicky drove around aimlessly in No. 4 after he left the hospital. He stopped for coffee and had a cigarette. Not ready to return to the garage or go home, he found himself on Broad Street.
He parked the cab behind the Borelli Theater near the stage door, climbed the steps, and tried the door, relieved when it opened easily. The theater was a lot like a church in that way: usually, no matter the time, you could find an unlocked door to enter. He flipped on the work lights and walked out onto the stage, where the set pieces from Twelfth Night were marooned in the circles of light. The rowboat that washed up on the chicken wire shore of Illyria had been propped against the flat, its oars tucked neatly inside. The forest, a collection of papier-mâché trees, flanked the wings. As Nicky stood at the edge of the pretend forest, he wished it would multiply and grow into acres, filling a painted landscape of mountains beyond it. He imagined walking into that world and never returning to this one.
But no such luck. After a time, he walked off the stage and up the aisle to the stairs that led to the mezzanine. He took a seat in the dark theater in one of the red velvet seats, worn from use and time, which suited his weary body just right. The scent in the air, of paint and chalk, stale perfume, and peppermint soothed him as he leaned back and stretched his legs out onto the mezzanine wall. The clutter of overhead lights, rigged on black, reminded him of a traffic jam, their metal shells layered one over the other, flaps open like the hoods of cars. He liked a theater in repose between performances, every aspect at rest; all that was needed were the actors, the crew, and the audience. Despite all he’d been through that day, the theater still gave him a sense of possibility.
Nicky had watched most rehearsals from the mezzanine over the past three years, and remembered them in detail. On the first day of rehearsal of every new production, Sam Borelli had a ritual. He gathered the company and crew on the stage to introduce them to one another for the first time. There would be forty or fifty of them, but Borelli knew each person by name, and when he introduced them individually, he’d give a quick snapshot of the job they did and why they were great at it.
A spear chucker was given the same deference as the leading man, the set designer as the costume assistant, the prop master as the director himself. Borelli insisted that the theater belonged to everyone, regardless of their role or position, and that came with a personal responsibility to be excellent, to be alert, stay focused, and do one’s best work because each artisan’s contribution had a direct effect on the outcome of the play and therefore the audience’s experience.
Nicky remembered Mrs. Borelli observing rehearsals from the last row of the orchestra. Calla, he remembered, was in and out. He hadn’t paid her much attention; she was younger than he and helped out on the various crews, but he had little interaction with her. He was surprised when it was announced she would take over the company. Evidently he wasn’t the only person at Borelli’s keeping a secret.
Nicky found himself drifting off to sleep, when he heard, “Anybody here?”
He sat up in his chair and saw Calla Borelli onstage looking around the empty theater for signs of life.
He waved, “Up here.”
“Nicky?”
“Yeah.”
“That was fast. Did Mrs. Mooney send you a telegram?”
Calla Borelli held a mop and bucket as she stood in a pool of light onstage.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Come down and I’ll tell you.”
Nicky joined her onstage. “Allow me.” He picked up the cleaning supplies. “How can I help?”
“Put them back in the supply closet. Monsieur and Madame are now sparkling.”
“Why do you clean the bathrooms?” Nicky followed Calla downstairs to the costume shop.
“They needed it.”
“You could have the janitor do it.”
“I had to cut back on his hours.”
“Him too?”
“It’s okay. They gave him more hours at the bank.” Calla opened the doors of the supply closet. Nicky loaded the equipment inside before following her into the costume shop.
“Does it seem to you there are more banks in Philadelphia than ever before?”
“You know what my dad says. Better a cabaret on every corner than a bank. If there’s a cabaret, at least you can sing about the pain.” Calla buried her hands in the pockets of her work coveralls and looked at Nicky. “I went over to the garage to see you today.”
“You’ve finally come to your senses and figured out that Frank Arrigo is never going to amount to an
ything, and you’d be better off with a cab driver?”
“No. I wanted to ask if you’d take over the role of Sebastian in Twelfth Night. Peter Menecola is out.”
Nicky didn’t know what to say.
Calla took his silence as the sign of a tough negotiation. “I know I fired you from the company, and that might give you pause.”
“Why wouldn’t it?” he said softly.
“But one has nothing to do with the other. Tony and Norma came to me and were impressed with how well you did, and they believe you could play the part. I believe you can too.”
“Are you playing Olivia?”
“Cathy’s back.”
“Hmm.” Nicky folded his arms and leaned against the work table. “I don’t know.”
“Five dollars a show.”
“You’re giving me a raise after you canned me?”
“You could look at it that way. So do you want to do it?”
“It’s not about wanting to. I want to. Do you really think I can do the job?”
“I wouldn’t offer you the part. We’ll rehearse so you’re comfortable. We’ll have to work fast—and put some hours in. And Dad is around. He said he’d coach you if you needed help.”
“He’d do that?”
“Sure. He’s been meeting with Tony for years. Norma too. A couple other actors in the company stop by and meet with him for tune-ups.”
“I didn’t know.”
“There’s a lot more to acting than rehearsals.”
“Now I’m scared.”
“You should be.”
“Are you the same director that just hired me?”
“If you weren’t scared, you’d be a lousy actor. And if I wasn’t scared, I’d be a terrible director.”
Nicky sat down on the work stool.
“You okay?” Calla asked.
“This was the worst day, and now you’ve made it the best day. This sort of thing doesn’t happen to me. I either have a good run or a bad run, but not something horrible followed by good news in the same day. This can only mean one thing. Doom.”
Calla put her hands on Nicky’s shoulders. He reached back and placed his hands upon hers. “May I tell you something?”
Calla sat down next to him.