Kiss Carlo

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Some families inherit money, others flat feet; we got two hard-headed husbands who want to be right more than they want to keep the peace. As if they know what’s right.” Jo stood to go.

  Jo placed her hand on Nancy’s as a beam from the afternoon sun lit the bright blue hydrangeas.

  “That’s the exact blue I painted the boys’ room when they were little. Remember? You picked it.” Jo pointed.

  “I painted our boys’ room the same color.” Nancy smiled.

  “Still the same?” Jo asked.

  “Long gone. You?”

  “Long gone.”

  Jo followed Nancy down the long gravel path out of the cemetery. When they reached the street, they embraced before parting, one went east, the other west, but somehow that day, they went in the same direction.

  * * *

  Calla stood in the kitchen of her family home. Her sisters, their husbands, and their families had left, and for the first time since their father died, she was in the house alone.

  A ceramic lamp, a tiered crystal serving dish, and a small silver clock were arranged neatly on the kitchen table, each item labeled “Helen.” On the counter, stacked neatly, was the full set of her mother’s formal china, a Rosewood pattern given to her by their grandmother, labeled “Portia.” Calla put her hands in her pockets and walked out of the room through packing boxes, walls stained with the shadows of time where there had once been a work of art or a mirror.

  This was now her life.

  What had once been precious, and in her mind should be preserved as it was for all time, was now going to be divided, carted away, and disassembled in pieces, which would never be as strong as the whole. Her mother’s lamp would never be as lovely as it had been in the front window, where it spilled light out onto the porch, turning the old wood to silver from gray. The clock taken from her father’s desk would never again remind him that it was time to go to rehearsal. The tiered crystal plate would never again hold her mother’s biscotti, better than any professional baker’s in South Philly. The fine china, stacked on the kitchen counter that held the meal that fed them at every holiday and special occasion, washed and dried with such care, would be shipped to her sister’s house, where Calla was certain it would be placed in a closet and forgotten, along with their memories.

  Calla climbed the steps to her bedroom. She wanted to crawl into her bed and sleep for as many days as it would take to make her feel like herself again. When she reached the top of the stairs, instead of going into her own room, she found herself walking down the hallway to the master bedroom. On her way, she passed her sisters’ old bedroom, which had become a guest room for their visits. Calla poked her head inside. Helen, the fastidious one, had stripped the beds; the sheets were in a laundry basket, waiting to be laundered. The tops of their dressers had been cleared of the framed photographs that had been placed there since they were girls. Even though the photographs belonged to Helen and Portia, their absence gave Calla a feeling of abandonment, a signal her sisters had decided never to return home again.

  Calla opened the master bedroom door. She stood in the dark and inhaled the scent of the room. Her father had left a window open, as was his habit year round, regardless of the weather. The lilacs that twisted up the drainpipe outside the window were in bloom, filling the room with their sweet scent. She grinned, remembering her father calling them “nun flowers,” because his wife would cut bunches of them, wrap them in wet newspaper, and deliver them to the convent, to be laid at the feet of the statue of the Blessed Mother.

  Calla flipped the light on. She didn’t remember making the bed, but she had. The closet door was open. She went inside, pulled the string of the overhead bulb. The contents were neat, but there was a space where she had removed her father’s best suit so he might be buried in it. The wooden shoe trees that had been placed in his dress shoes lay on a shelf. The funeral home had given Calla a list of items they needed, which read exactly like a list of what her father wore to any of his opening nights: pressed shirt, handkerchief, silk tie, dress socks, undergarments, braces for the socks, dress shoes, belt, suit. They asked for his brush and comb, and his shaving supplies. Calla had provided all of it.

  In the course of a year, Calla had lost her mother and her father. When she was a girl, her sisters used to talk at night, thinking their baby sister was asleep, but Calla was listening. Helen and Portia would wonder which parent would die first, and what they would do if the worst happened. They gossiped a lot, about boys and school, but Calla remembered how they complained about the things they didn’t have. They wanted things that other girls had, things that in their home were impossible to obtain because they cost too much money. Helen and Portia dreamed of a fancy family car, a maroon Duesenberg like the one the Fiorios owned; of faille dresses from the window of Harper’s Dress Shop, and red patent leather shoes from Wanamaker’s department store.

  Calla remembered when Helen and Portia insisted on getting permanent waves in their hair at the beauty salon. Their friend Kitty Martinelli had gotten her hair done, and they wanted to look just like her. The process was expensive, but their mother had figured out a way to get the girls what they wanted. They got the perms and came home in tears: their thick, wavy hair looked like dandelion puffs. Never once did her sisters think that coveting Kitty’s lustrous curls was the problem, not the ingredients in the permanent wave.

  Calla sat down in her father’s reading chair and leaned back. The chair’s sage-green velvet, piped in black, was worn at the arms and seat. There was a lace doily on the back of the chair, which had been there since she was a girl. When her father had a wild head of black hair in his youth, he used Macassar oil to slick his hair back, so Calla’s mother had placed doilies on all the backs of the chairs in the house to preserve the slipcovers.

  The table next to the floor lamp had a few books stacked upon it. Most of Sam’s books had already made their way into Calla’s room; her father had given them to her as she needed them for her work at the theater. Like a good professor, Sam had introduced Calla to Shakespeare through the sonnets, graduating to the comedies, and eventually the tragedies. Sam’s Riverside Shakespeare was held together with a wide grosgrain ribbon because the binding threads had dissolved from age and use. Calla didn’t have the heart to untie the ribbon, knowing that inside, her father’s margin notes would break her heart all over again. She didn’t need clues to understand her father, but instead reveled in the layers and depths of his thought process. No matter how many times Sam had read a play, directed it, or seen another company’s production, he had found something new in the text. He called reading an act of discovery. Calla was too exhausted to discover anything new.

  A stack of letters from Sister Jean Klene, with the return address Saint Mary’s College, South Bend, Indiana, were bound with a rubber band. Sister Jean was Sam’s favorite American Shakespeare scholar and the two had exchanged letters for years. Sam had met the nun when a theater troupe he worked with traveled through Indiana. Sister Jean offered insight on the text and information about productions she had seen around the world.

  Calla lifted the book on the top of the pile on his side table. Life in Shakespeare’s England had been her father’s bible. He referred to it a lot, recommended it to his actors, and shared it with Calla. Sam often quoted John Dover Wilson as though he were Shakespeare himself. Calla thumbed through the book, stopping to read what her father had been thinking about in the days and hours before his death.

  Sam had an odd habit of marking the places in books he read with matchsticks, strips of newspaper, old bills, even collar stays. Through the years his daughters had given him fancy bookmarks, but they remained unused in the top drawer of his dresser, next to his good cuff links.

  John Dover Wilson’s book had been read so often, the spine was shot, so the pages lay open flat like a map. Sam often used Italian in his notes, and just as his nickname for his wife had been Bella, he added it to each of
his daughters’ names as a term of endearment. Calla found a note written to her on the front of the monthly electric bill envelope. Her father had drawn a monocle on the cartoon of the mascot, Reddy Kilowatt, along with this message:

  Calla Bella—page 288

  Calla’s hand began to tremble as she turned the pages. Her father had drawn an arrow to indicate a passage. He had also doodled small triangle flags around it, like an Elizabethan banner.

  Death

  The passage was titled aptly, but next to it, Sam had written “Fine,” which Calla knew in this instance, did not mean “all right” but rather the Italian word that, translated, meant “The End.” She read:

  It is therefore Death alone that can suddenly make man to know himself. He tells the proud and insolent that they are but abjects and humbles them at the instant; makes them cry, complain and repent, yea, even to hate their forepassed happiness. He takes the account of the rich and proves him a beggar, a naked beggar, which hath interest in nothing but in the gravel that fills his mouth. He holds a glass before the eyes of the most beautiful and makes them see therein their deformity and rottenness, and they acknowledge it. Oh eloquent, just and mighty Death! Whom none could advise thou hast persuaded, what none hath dared thou hast done, and whom all the world hath flattered thou only hast cast out of the world and despised. Thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with those two narrow words, Hic jacet.*

  —Sir Walter Raleigh, The Historie of the World, 1614

  Sam added a note to Calla under the passage:

  Don’t be afraid of dying. I am not. This is scary stuff – but only for those who live in service to the wrong things. You won’t.

  Dad

  Calla closed the old book and held it close. She was grateful to her father for everything. She also felt gratitude toward her mother, who had loved her father so much, she’d sacrificed everything for him and his life’s work. Calla was also grateful to Helen and Portia, who valued the things in this world that she did not, and therefore left her with the things she most wanted from her parents’ house, which were, luckily for her, of no interest to them.

  Calla would keep her father’s library and his collection of prompt books, which included the scripts and notes from every production he had directed in his long career. She would also take her mother’s sewing basket and her bottle of Trapéze de Corday, with a thimbleful of perfume left at the bottom of the amber flask.

  Calla would also remember to take her mother’s red-handled paring knife from the kitchen drawer. In her very first memory, Calla was four years old, in the backyard of the house on Ellsworth Street. Her mother, exacting the small knife, quartered a ripe peach for her daughters to eat one summer afternoon. Vincenza Borelli’s lovely hands moved with dexterity, the blade of the knife making quick work of the fruit as it fell into golden pink velvet pieces.

  Vincenza gave each of her daughters a wedge, pierced the pit with the tip of the blade, and flung it into the garden bed. Calla remembered the pit as it flew through the air and landed in the distance. “Let’s see what grows from that,” her mother had said. That night Calla dreamed a tree grew in the garden, a stage tree made with papier-mâché, paint, brown velvet branches, gold lamé leaves, and berries made of red glass beads. Everyone thought Sam was the artist in the family, but it was Calla’s mother who had given her imagination birth.

  Helen would take their mother’s silver while Portia wanted the wedding crystal with authentic gold trim. There were lamps made of Italian alabaster topped with silk shades and a set of small Florentine study tables. Her sisters would take those too. It wasn’t a teacup or a piece of furniture that Calla needed to remember her parents; she would take tools they had used to build their romantic dreams. Vincenza had created a home and garden that delighted Sam while he created theatrical productions that celebrated love, life, and courage that could only come from the heart of a man who was living it.

  Calla wouldn’t expect her sisters to understand how she felt. They had left this old house, the theater, and South Philly without looking back. Helen and Portia worried that Calla lived in the past and that, like their father, their kid sister was obsessed with Shakespeare and would remain in his theatrical grip for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, Calla hoped she would; she wanted to be just like Sam, who found purpose in the plays when he was young and wisdom in them at the end of his life.

  At least Helen and Portia understood that beauty compelled their parents to create it. And, like the ripe peach the sisters shared on that summer day so long ago, they would taste the sweetness again in memory. Calla would too, and be grateful for it, but because she was an artist she would also take the rest, the parts of the fruit that no one wanted, the soft bruises on the skin, the leaves, and the stem in order to make sense of them. She would also take the pit, from which she would make something grow. There was meaning in all of it and it was an artist’s job to find it.

  * * *

  Garibaldi Avenue looked like a red satin ribbon as geraniums spilled out of hanging baskets and rosebushes burst with plump blossoms of burgundy and fuchsia. The summer heat had turned Roseto’s main street into a hothouse garden in full bloom. The banners welcoming the ambassador had been taken down, the streamers yanked from their poles, the flags from their wires, and the scandal was almost forgotten, replaced by a new one: the deacon having run off with his secretary and the collection basket from Saint Rocco’s in Martins Creek.

  Mamie Confalone carried two brown grocery bags up the walkway to Minna Viglione’s front door. She rang the bell and waited. Soon, Minna appeared.

  “Two bags?”

  “I’m going to the shore this week. So I shopped double for you.”

  “Right. It’s vacation week at the mill.”

  “I live for it.” Mamie followed Minna into the house and back to her kitchen.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Ocean City.”

  Minna clapped her hands together. “The beach.”

  “My folks rented a little shack down the shore. And I can’t wait.”

  “I used to love to go to the ocean.”

  “You’re welcome to come. It’s not far. We could take you. We have room.”

  “Maybe next year. I want to see the ocean again.” Minna smiled as Mamie began to unload the groceries from the bag. “You don’t have to do that. I can do it.”

  “I’m a full-service delivery operation. From Ruggiero’s Market to your cupboard.” Mamie looked out the window. “Your garden is gorgeous. Who rigged the muslin?” Minna’s garden was draped in a canopy of white fabric to protect the plants from the hot sun, and to discourage the birds from eating the grapes.

  “Eddie Davanzo.”

  “That was nice of him.”

  “He’s handy. He’s kind, and he’s handsome.”

  “And you have a crush on him.”

  “I’m too old for him. But you’re not.”

  “You like him for me?” Mamie folded her arms and leaned against the counter.

  “He’s a man like they used to make them. Solid.”

  “He is a policeman.”

  “I am not talking about his job.”

  “I know, Minna. But I haven’t thought about him in that way.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I wasn’t ready for romance for the longest time. Five years. More. And then, one night, a storm came through and blew the windows out of my house. And I could breathe again. The despair lifted. The grief wasn’t gone entirely, but it felt different. I could put it in its place. Manage it. It wasn’t my life anymore, it was just a part of it. Sadness wasn’t the only thing I felt. I could feel other things too.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  Mamie looked off. “It’s a start.”

  “You give me hope,” Minna admitted.

  “Do you think you’ll ever leave this house?”

  “Every morning I thi
nk, this is the day, and I get up, I’ve got gumption. So, I tend the garden, do the wash, make the gravy, do all those things someone does when they take care of a home. And soon it’s late afternoon, and by then I’m tired and I’ve lost the courage to try. And I tell myself, tomorrow will be the day.”

  Mamie understood the inertia. It had been the same for her—except she had a goal: she vowed that she would get Augie raised, and afterwards would live again. “But we don’t know about tomorrow, Minna. With all the choices we make, we don’t really make the important ones, those are made for us. Think about the shore, will you?”

  “I will.”

  Mamie gave Minna a quick kiss on the cheek before leaving.

  Minna heard the front door close. She thought about baking a pie, but decided she’d put it off until the next day. She took off her apron and walked to the living room. She peered out the curtains. She stood at the front door, opened it, and went out on to the porch. She felt the warm air envelop her like a cashmere shawl.

  Minna went down the front walk on her way to the street but stopped short of the sidewalk. The last inlay of blue slate on the walkway was the boundary that separated Minna from the rest of the world. She could stand on that stone and greet a neighbor, collect the mail, or welcome a guest inside. But this morning, instead of remaining behind the boxwood hedge that hemmed the small patches of green grass, she closed her eyes and stepped out onto the sidewalk for the first time in seven years. She placed one foot on the cement square, and then the other. Her mind flashed with an image of mud, her sandaled foot pulled into muck. She shook her head to rid herself of the picture. Instead of living inside the fear, she opened her eyes and looked down at her feet. She confirmed she was safe, but stood there, unsure, her hands formed into tight fists, as she fought her deepest anxiety.

  Minna stood on that spot for as long as she could bear it, a matter of seconds. She inhaled, exhaled, and tried to control the waves of panic. She heard a cacophony of sound, the voices of every person who had ever spoken to her since the day she was born, living or dead, in a loud chorus. Her brain filled with the goo of their conversation, and she was afraid as they talked over one another, loudly admonishing her to turn back, go back, get inside. She shook her head, again certain their voices were imagined, not real, and therefore didn’t matter.