“A man doesn’t flail on the important decisions! He nails down the important things and does not falter! Right, Ma?”
“You’re right, Mabel,” Jo said weakly.
Uncle Dom poured himself a small glass of bitters. “Women always stand together, and it starts early. Don’t ever play Red Rover at Sacred Heart School. Those girls form a line like a chain-link fence—believe me, the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame couldn’t cut through it.” He downed the glass.
Nicky got a whiff of the Fernet Branca, and it invigorated him. “She’ll understand. I’m not doing this to be selfish.”
“Oh, now it’s a generous act of a loving heart?” Mabel was mystified. “Nicky, for the love of God, pick a side here.”
“You’ll ruin her life for sure by not marrying her,” Aunt Jo said softly.
“How? Besides the ring, the new house, and the party, what is the big deal about getting married?” Nicky was exasperated.
A pall came over the room. Nicky could hear his Uncle Dom’s heart thumping in his carotid artery.
Mabel raised her hand. “May I speak?”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Gio said under his breath.
“Nicky,” Mabel began, “I’ve been in this family for twelve months, and if I may, I’m gonna explain this to you once. So listen carefully. From the time she has thoughts, a girl dreams of her wedding day like a little boy dreams of becoming a famous baseball player, getting rich, conquering the world, and being important.”
Gio groaned.
“A woman holds her virtue like a prize,” she continued. “It’s her way of securing her future with one man under one God in one house of her own design. In exchange for that life, imagined in her dreams, and promised by the man of her choosing, secured with a decent ring, the woman gives the man a joy he has never known.”
Uncle Dom belched on his bitters.
Mabel went on, “Look at what the man gets. He gets a life! He is taken care of! He gets a house full of children, hot meals, the laundry done, waxed floors, clean sheets, and a foot rub every other Saturday night or whatever particular request the husband makes of the wife, that’s for the couple to sort out in private. Now, let’s look at what she gets. She gets a purpose. A woman aspires to be a bride in order to be a wife, which gives her a job, which gives her a place in this world that is indisputable, irrefutable, and wholly and uniquely her own in the eyes of God and the law. When you yank that away from a woman and you rescind a proper offer of marriage, you have fired her from her own life.”
“She’ll find somebody else,” Uncle Dom interjected. “She’s a pleasant enough–looking girl. She’s a very lean tomato.”
“That’s not what we look for in a tomato.” Jo didn’t try to hide her annoyance.
“Doesn’t matter. Won’t happen. She won’t find anyone else if Nicky wrecks the deal,” Mabel assured him.
“How do you know?” Lena asked.
“Peachy waited too long for Nicky. Our group is married off. Whoever might have been a potential replacement died in the war. Only the odd duck here and there is available, and you don’t want a specimen from that pool. Peachy is finished.” Mabel dumped three teaspoons of sugar into her coffee.
“I agree with Mabel.” Aunt Jo patted Nicky’s hand. “You’ve never done anything wrong, Nicky, until now.”
“Look, I want to be Joe DiMaggio, but I’m not angry because I can’t throw a baseball. I’m not going to marry Peachy because she’s wanted this since she was a little girl. I won’t marry her because it makes all of you comfortable or because the DePinos want to use up the free champagne they won at a carnival or because they feel badly about their cousins who got thrown into an internment camp.”
“Then don’t.” Aunt Jo removed her hand from Nicky’s.
Mabel picked up the empty dessert plates. “Fine. Don’t marry her, Nicky. But you will hate yourself for the rest of your life. At night, when you close your eyes, you’ll see Peachy’s face—like a martyr on a Holy Card. You’ll think of those big eyes of hers that look like manhole covers and the image of her face will make you shake like a live electrical cord in the bathtub. I couldn’t live with the constant reminder of the pain I inflicted. But of course, it’s up to you.” Mabel picked up the dishes and went into the kitchen.
“God almighty, she’s like an anvil.” Uncle Dom threw back the rest of his drink.
“I married a strong girl,” Gio said with a shrug. “She can pick up a car with her bare hands.”
“We have a lift in the garage for that,” Dom reminded him.
“Gio, help with dessert. Daddy will want a dish of gelato. There’s peach in the freezer.” Aunt Jo motioned with her head, averting a father-and-son argument. Gio complied, and Dom sat back in his chair.
“Mabel is gigantic. I’ve never seen a woman that big.” Dom ate a chocolate turtle from Stuckey’s.
“Your mother.”
“She was large-boned in her youth.”
“So, Mabel is large-boned too.”
“From sfogliatelle. Not from bones.”
“It doesn’t matter. Everyone ends up thin in the end. We all shrink. Bones or not. So knock it off.”
“Mabel may have triplets in there. Nicky, we may have to camp a couple babies with you.”
“No babies in the basement,” Aunt Jo said to Nicky to reassure him. It reminded him that he had put a down payment on the house on Wharton. What a mess he had made, what a pile of details to untangle, if he even could. He hoped that he woke up in the morning having changed his mind and decided to marry Peachy after all.
“Don’t marry her,” Nonna said from her rocker, under her afghan.
The family turned to her.
“No good!” she said, then closed her eyes again.
“Or. You listen to my mother-in-law. When she’s not senile, she’s a seer.” Uncle Dom cracked a walnut and fished out the meat of the nut and chewed. “To me? That’s a sign.”
* * *
“Pop, you need a sweater,” Calla said through the screen door.
“I like the air,” Sam told her. The breeze ruffled the leaves on the old elm that shadowed the porch as the blue night settled in around him.
Calla pushed the door open with her hip, handed her father a demitasse cup of espresso, and placed one for herself on the small side table on the porch. She reached into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a cloth napkin. “Biscotti.” Calla offered one to her father, almond with glints of pistachio. He took one and sat down.
“You’re getting to be a pretty good baker.”
“You think so?”
“These are as good as your mother’s.”
“I’ll tell the folks at the bakery you said so.”
Sam laughed. “And here I thought you were going to tell me you’re ready to get married to that nice Frank Arrigo and make a home of your own and start baking from your mother’s recipe box.”
“Come on, Dad.”
“Don’t you want to get married?”
“Someday, maybe.”
“He wants to marry you.”
“Did he say something?”
“He didn’t have to. He circles you like a hummingbird. It’s how men do.”
“I like him.”
“He seems like a nice guy.”
“It’s happening too fast.”
“Your mother was eighteen years old when we fell in love. We got married when she was twenty.”
“I know.”
“I’d like to see you settled.”
“I am settled.”
“You look after me. That’s not how a young woman should be spending her time.”
“I have a say in the matter, and this is where I want to be.”
“Helen said I could go and live with them.”
“Helen? You’d last two days over there.”
“I’d barely get through an afternoon.” Sam chuckled.
“Nice of her to offer.”
“I have three good daught
ers. Portia said she’d have me too. But I would never move to New York. Not at this age.”
“You should live here in the house you love until the day you die.”
“It doesn’t always work like that, Calla.”
“It will as long as I’m on the job.”
“Why are you so determined? Who put you in charge of the happy ending of my life story?”
“I think you should have what you want. You’ve worked your whole life. Really hard too. And you didn’t have a job where you went in and punched a clock, worked your time, and took a paycheck and went home. You had a job where you stuck your neck out—you had to create something that entertained people, that lifted their spirits or made them think. You made something that took them away from the drudgery of their jobs and made them feel like something more was possible. You never knew if there’d be enough left over to pay you and provide for your family. That had to be difficult. On top of that, you had to endure criticism in public. You had to take the beating from the critics, hold your head high, and go back into the theater the next night and pretend that the terrible things written about your best efforts didn’t bother you. That’s why I want you to live in this house until the end. You should, at long last, do what you want to do. You should choose.”
“I did choose, Calla. And your mother let me. She wanted me to be happy at work, even if that meant a year or two would go by where she wouldn’t have a new dress or go to the shore, or do the things women enjoy. She never made me feel like I was wasting time or squandering our future on a dream that couldn’t sustain us. She just let me work. She just let me be. I hope there’s an afterlife, because I want to see her to thank her. I didn’t thank her. She gave up everything for me and for you girls, and it was as if we expected it. I had my purpose, and she had hers. It may have worked, but only one of us was selfless.”
“When Ma was dying, she asked me to look out for you. She said that you would probably remarry. She thought that Monica Spadoni had an eye on you.”
“She ended up with a wallpaper man from Metuchen.”
“So Ma was wrong about that. But you’re wrong about her. She loved you and admired your work and supported the theater. I almost think she enjoyed Shakespeare more than you do. So you are not to feel badly about what you did or didn’t do. You did plenty, and it was enough. You gave up a lot too. And that’s why you don’t have to live with Helen and her husband and her noisy kids, or with Portia in New York. You will remain right here in your home where you have peace and a kitchen and a garden that doesn’t exactly look good but grows in its fashion, the best it can. Okay?”
Sam Borelli nodded because he couldn’t speak. He was afraid he would cry, and the last thing he wanted was for Calla to feel sorry for him.
“I’m going to do the dishes.” She gave her father a kiss on the cheek. “You need anything?”
“Nope. Thank you.”
Calla went inside the old house. The streetlights pulled on, pink beams streaked through the twilight as if to set a scene. Sam sipped his espresso and imagined what might play in the light.
Sam was reading Lear and Richard and the Henrys again, seeking the counsel of kings. He returned to the plays he had tackled in his youth, but now that history was tangible to him, he found wisdom in the verse, phrases that pinpointed his pain and identified his longing in the final act of his life. The monologues and speeches, once his greatest challenges to stage, were now literature to him, and he could read them solely for insight. Sam had always found clarity in the Shakespeare canon, but now he also found solace.
Lear tested his daughters, so Sam never did. Richard chose favorites on the court, which led to his ruin, so Sam was careful to treat all the members of his troupe equally. Henry IV convinced Sam to surrender the theater to Calla, to the next generation, so it might become hers and reflect a new vision. But there was nothing in all of Shakespeare, so familiar to Sam, the text having been his constant companion over many years, that could prepare him for the finale of his own life.
Sam Borelli was suspended in a state of disbelief that he had arrived at the destination. He never thought he would get old, but he had. He never thought he would outlive his wife, and he had. He hadn’t foreseen a time when he wouldn’t be working, directing a play, running the business of the theater, but now he wasn’t. So he filled the moments reading the plays that had brought him pleasure and attempting, through them, to make sense of the experience of living in the context of leaving.
He doubted he would master the mystery in time.
It had been a Sam Borelli choice, and eventually a signature of his process, to stage the final scene of any play he directed on the first day of rehearsal. The actors never liked it, but it gave Sam a framework to build to the playwright’s intention. And just as in life, if a man imagines himself on his deathbed and then works back through the years of his life, he will make better decisions along the way, knowing the end. Or at the very least, he’ll spend his time more wisely.
* * *
The night sky over Bella Vista was violet, embroidered with ribbons of gray clouds obscuring the stars and the moon. From the Palazzinis’ rooftop garden, the neighborhood twinkled below, with strings of lights crisscrossed over gardens and orange embers glistening in the hibachis like buckets of gold.
Alone on the roof, Elsa reveled in the cool night air as she watered the tomato plants. Nicky pushed the door to the roof open.
“Sorry, Elsa.” Nicky turned to go back down the stairs.
“No, no, come up. No clouds today, so they got a lot of sun. They need more water.”
“Looks like it could rain tonight, though,” Nicky said, looking up.
“It could.”
“Good batch?”
“There will be enough tomatoes for two winters.”
“Here, let me help.” Nicky took the hose from her.
Elsa sat down in the chaise longue and put her feet up.
“Is the baby asleep?” Nicky asked.
“Always asleep by eight o’clock.”
“You know my aunt Jo is in awe of you.”
“Why?”
“Your boy is on a schedule.”
“I remember my mother and how she ran our home, and that’s how I do it.”
Nicky nodded.
“Everyone is worried about you,” Elsa said. “Are you sure about ending your engagement?”
“I’m more sure than I was when I asked her to marry me.”
“Don’t let anyone pressure you into doing something you don’t want to do.”
“It’s not easy.”
“If you marry the wrong girl, you’ll have a very sad life.”
“It sounds like I’m going to be sad any way it goes.”
“Only at first.”
Nicky turned off the hose and took a seat on the lawn chair. He offered Elsa a cigarette. She took it. He lit hers and then his own. “You have some experience with a broken engagement?”
“I do.”
“No kidding.”
“I was betrothed to a man before the war. He was a good man. His name was Peter. He was a professor, and he was driving home from a conference, and he was killed in an accident.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We were going to marry, and our plan was to come to America together and bring my family and his parents. He died, and the plan fell apart. His mother didn’t want to leave his grave there. So she insisted on staying.”
“And your family?”
“My mother and father thought it was all a terrible mistake and that the people in Germany would come to their senses and take back their government. We know now that didn’t happen. I lost my family. My sisters. For nothing.”
“And you had already lost Peter.”
“In a way, that prepared me for the worst. I was already broken—the war just finished me off.”
“But you met Dominic.”
“He looks like Peter.”
“No kidding.”
&nbs
p; “I thought Dominic was him. The war was over, and the Americans came in, and I was standing with a group of girls—we had been working in a hospital; spared, they called us—and he came in with the American officers, and he looked at me as though he knew me, and I felt the same when I looked at him, and that was that.”
“Did you marry right away?”
“We were liberated, and as soon as he could, Dominic came for me.”
“Based on one meeting?”
“He knew.”
“And you?”
“I felt safe with him. For me, that’s love. Nick, you have to decide what love is for you. Everybody does. And people are different.”
“I’ll say.”
“You should find a girl who is the same as you are in the ways that matter.”
“Peachy wants the wedding, the house, the kids, but I have a funny feeling she doesn’t really want me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She could have everything she dreams of with just about any guy in the world. She doesn’t really need me to have her dream.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t feel that way.”
“I don’t think she’d understand, even if I explained it.”
“But you’ll have to.”
“I know. She’s waited so long.”
“Don’t feel badly about that.”
“Why not?”
“Because she didn’t have to wait. No one made her wait.”
Nicky thought about this, and it made sense. Never once did Peachy ever say, “I’ve had enough.” She never forced an issue or took any side but his; she waited patiently, knowing that if she did, that Nicky would eventually do what she wanted, because he always had.
Elsa put out her cigarette and stood. “I’m going to check on the baby.” She started down the stairs, but before she left, she turned back. “Nicky, of all the things I hope for you, I want you to know the joy that comes from watching your baby sleep. It almost makes up for everything I’ve lost.”
“I believe you.”
Elsa went down the stairs, and Nicky leaned back, took a slow drag off his cigarette, and wondered where he’d find the courage to change his life. He remembered sometimes valor just shows up. If he was going to do any praying on the subject, it would be to ask for the vision to recognize it when it did.