CHAPTER FIVE
The Wife Behind the Curtain
Sal’s birthday was on the Saturday, and the party wasn’t.
I found this out on Tuesday, from Paula.
“Mr. Moretti asked me to let the venue know the gala’s moving to the fifteenth of next month,” she said on the phone, pleasantly. “He said you’d want to know for the vendors.”
“Moving.”
“Security thinks it’s too soon for an event that size with Ms. Romano in residence. Two hundred guests, a lot of unknowns. He’s asked Grant for a full review first.” She paused. “I assumed he’d told you.”
“He must have forgotten.”
I spent the next two days unwinding eight weeks of work.
I called the Bellmont and moved the ballroom.
I called the florist, who was gracious about it, and the band, who were not.
I called the caterer and moved the tasting.
I wrote a hundred and eighty change-of-date cards by hand in the evenings, at the kitchen island, because Sal was a man who thought an emailed invitation was an insult.
And because Sal was also a man who would be seventy years old on Saturday regardless of what security thought, I planned him a lunch.
It was small, forty people at Paolo and Elena’s house on Linden Avenue, the old guard and their wives, the ones who’d known Sal since he was a boy running numbers on Arthur Avenue.
I did it in four days. That was the part nobody in the family understood, how much could be done in four days if you knew exactly whom to call and in what order.
I knew DeLuca’s would do Sal’s favorite rum cake on short notice if I asked for Frankie and not the girl at the counter.
I knew Sal’s wife, Teresa, would cry if she saw the white peonies from their wedding, because she’d mentioned them to me once, three years ago, at a christening.
I knew the bartender at Sal’s club would come if I called him personally, and that he knew Sal’s old-fashioned recipe, which had a splash of amaretto that no one else would think to add.
On Wednesday afternoon, Paolo’s pharmacy called me.
The pharmacy was supposed to deliver, and in four years it had never once called me. But the delivery service had been changed without anyone telling anyone, and the refill of Paolo’s blood pressure medication was sitting on a shelf in a pharmacy in Mount Vernon, and he had one pill left.
“Is there anyone who can pick it up?” the pharmacist asked. “I tried the house. Your number’s the backup.”
I was the backup because I’d put myself there, four years earlier, after Paolo had gone three days without his pills during a mix-up and ended up in the emergency room.
I drove to Mount Vernon. It was forty minutes each way in traffic, and I’d been on my way to the florist. I picked up the medication and drove it to Linden Avenue and handed it to Paolo in his den, where he was watching a Yankees game on mute.
“You drove this over yourself?” he asked.
“The delivery got changed. They didn’t have anyone else.”
“Elena didn’t know?”
“Elena thinks the pharmacy is a magic box that pills come out of.”
He laughed, a rusty sound, and held onto my hand a moment longer than necessary. “Thank you, sweetheart.”
It was the first time in seven years he’d called me that.
* * *
On Thursday, Dante’s cousin Gina came to the house.
She was twenty-two, the youngest of Carmela’s children, a sweet, anxious girl who’d dropped out of Fordham twice and was working at a boutique in Scarsdale.
She asked Ines if I was home, and Ines brought her to my sitting room, and she stood in the doorway with her car keys still in her hand and burst into tears.
It took twenty minutes to get the story out of her.
She was pregnant. Nine weeks. The father was a sous-chef at a restaurant in Hoboken, a nice boy, she said, not Italian, not Catholic, and definitely not what her mother had in mind.
She hadn’t told anyone. She didn’t know what she wanted to do.
She’d driven around for an hour and ended up at my house.
“Why me?” I asked gently, handing her a tissue.
“Because you’re the only one who won’t tell my mother before I’m ready.” She blew her nose. “And because you’re the only one who ever asks me how I am like you actually want to know.”
I didn’t tell her what to do. It wasn’t mine to tell.
I asked her what she wanted, and she didn’t know, and I told her that was all right, that she didn’t have to know today.
I told her that whatever she decided, I’d sit beside her when she told her parents, and that if Carmela started shouting I’d tell her to lower her voice, and Carmela would, because Carmela was secretly afraid of me.
Gina laughed, wetly, and hugged me so hard I nearly fell over.
That evening Dante came home and found me in the kitchen writing change-of-date cards.
“Was that Gina’s car in the drive this afternoon?”
“She stopped by.”
“What for?”
I thought about it. It wasn’t my secret. “She wanted to talk.”
“About what?”
“Things. She’s twenty-two.”
He nodded, uninterested, and opened the refrigerator. “Where’s the good parmesan? The aged one.”
“Top shelf, behind the olives.”
“Why would anyone put it behind the olives?”
“Because I put it there, so Nico wouldn’t find it when he comes over and eats it straight off the block.”
He found it, laughed, and cut himself a piece. “You know where everything is.”
“Someone has to,” I said, and he kissed the top of my head on his way past, fondly, and took his parmesan to the study.
He called down from upstairs at ten that night.
“Viv? Where’s my passport? The good one, not the Italian one. I’ve got Montreal on Monday.”
“Top drawer of the dresser in your closet. Under the cufflink tray. The Italian one’s in the safe.”
A pause. “Why is it under the cufflink tray?”
“Because you keep putting it on the kitchen counter and Ines keeps moving it to a different drawer every time, so I picked one and told her.”
Another pause. “When was that?”
“About four years ago.”
He came down five minutes later with the passport in his hand and a strange expression. “I’ve been getting my passport out of that drawer for four years and never once wondered how it got there.”
“That’s the idea,” I said.
He looked at me as though he were about to say something. Then his phone buzzed, and he looked at it, and whatever he’d been going to say went back wherever it had come from.
After he’d gone up, I opened my laptop at the kitchen island and did what I did most Wednesday nights, which was update what Luca called, not entirely as a joke, the Moretti Bible.
It was a spreadsheet. It had started four years earlier as a list of birthdays and had grown, the way these things do, into forty-one tabs.
Birthdays and anniversaries for ninety-three people.
Allergies and dietary restrictions, including the fact that Nico’s current girlfriend was vegan on weekdays and not on weekends.
Which cousins couldn’t be seated together and why, with dates.
Paolo’s medications, dosages, refill schedule, the pharmacy’s direct line.
Standing orders: Aunt Rosalind’s birthday flowers every April, from Elena and the family, because Elena had forgotten three years running and Rosalind had not forgiven her for the third.
A Christmas gift every year for Luca’s godmother in Staten Island, signed from Luca, because Luca had forgotten once at twenty-five and his godmother had cried.
Sal and Teresa’s wedding flowers. Carmela’s grandchildren’s shoe sizes.
Nobody had asked me to make it. Nobody had ever looked at it except Luca, once, over my shoulder, who’d read three tabs and then said, “Jesus, Viv,” in a voice I couldn’t quite read.
I added a new row that night. Mia Grieco, 8. Likes green, not yellow. Afraid of the dark. Rabbit named Gregory. Hot chocolate, stirred the whole time.
Then I closed the laptop and went up to bed.
* * *
The lunch was on Saturday.
Elena arrived at ten to help, which meant she arrived at ten to make suggestions. She stood in the dining room on Linden Avenue, which was her dining room, which I’d been allowed to arrange for the day, and looked at the white peonies on the long table.
“White,” she said. “Interesting. I’d have done yellow. Sal likes yellow.”
“Teresa likes white. They were her wedding flowers.”
Elena’s eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. “Were they.”
“She told me at the Farina christening.”
“Well.” Elena adjusted one stem by a fraction of an inch. “You’re very thorough.”
For the next two hours she moved things I’d placed and I moved them back when she left the room, and neither of us mentioned it.
She suggested that Vito sit beside Sal, and I explained quietly that Vito’s former brother-in-law was coming and they couldn’t be within sight of each other, and she said she’d never heard anything about that, and I said it was from the ‘09 business with the trucking company, and she looked at me for a long moment and let it go.
At noon, halfway through setting out the place cards, Carmela called me. Not Elena. Me.
“Vivienne. Rosalind and Anna aren’t speaking again. Anna says she won’t come if Rosalind’s at her table.”
“What happened?”
“Rosalind told someone Anna’s daughter’s wedding was tacky.”
“Was it?”
“Of course it was tacky. There were swans.”
I moved Anna to Paolo’s table, where no one would dare make a scene, and moved Rosalind next to Father Tomasi, where no one would dare gossip, and called Anna myself to tell her she’d been seated with the guest of honor’s brother as a special courtesy, which pleased her so much she forgot to be angry.
It took eleven minutes. Carmela said, “How do you do that?” and I said, “Practice,” and hung up and went back to the place cards.
The lunch was beautiful. I say that without modesty, because I’d earned it.
When Sal walked into the dining room and saw the peonies, he stopped.
Teresa put her hand over her mouth. The bartender from his club was behind the sideboard making his old-fashioned with the splash of amaretto, and when Sal tasted it, he turned around and looked at the room with his eyes wet and said, “Who did all this?”
Dante was standing beside him.
“Look at this,” Sal said, clapping him on the shoulder, gesturing at the room, the flowers, the cake, the bartender, the forty people who had been seated so skillfully that no one had yet noticed that three feuds were being kept apart.
“Your wife runs the tightest ship in this whole family, Dante. You’re a lucky man. ”
“I am,” Dante said, and smiled, and put his arm around his uncle, and accepted it.
He meant it. He was proud, the way he’d be proud of a well-run port or a quarter that came in above projections.
He stood there in the warmth of his uncle’s gratitude and let it rest on him, and he didn’t look around the room for me.
He didn’t say, Vivienne did this. He didn’t know how much there was to say.
He’d seen the flowers and the cake. He hadn’t seen the pharmacy in Mount Vernon or the eleven minutes on the phone with Carmela or the hundred and eighty handwritten cards.
To him, the house ran. The family functioned. Lunches happened.
I was standing twenty feet away holding a glass of prosecco I hadn’t touched. Teresa found me a few minutes later and took both my hands and said, “The peonies. You remembered. I only mentioned them once.”
“You said they were the only thing about your wedding you chose yourself.”
She looked at me for a long moment and squeezed my hands. “Sal doesn’t know who did this, does he?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters,” she said quietly. “It always matters. It’s just that none of them ever notice until it stops.”
I thought about that for the rest of the afternoon.
I thought about it while I made sure Paolo took his pill with lunch.
I thought about it while I kept Vito and his former brother-in-law on opposite sides of the garden during coffee.
I thought about it on the drive home, while Dante talked happily about how well the whole thing had gone and how pleased Sal had been.
“You did a great job,” he said, reaching over to squeeze my knee.
“Thank you.”
“Sal was really touched.”
“I know. I was there.”
He didn’t hear anything in that. He turned up the radio. It was a Sinatra song Sal’s bartender had played at the lunch, and Dante sang along under his breath, badly, and after a while I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes.
* * *