CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
His Mother
Dante’s father called me himself, which he had done perhaps four times in seven years.
“It’s my birthday Sunday,” Paolo said, his voice rougher than I remembered. “Seventy-three. Nothing big. Family only. I’d like you there.”
“Paolo, I don’t know if that’s...”
“Dante won’t be there. He told me he’d stay away if you’d come. He said you should be able to sit at that table without having to look at him.” He paused. “Seven years you drove across town for my pills. You can come eat a piece of cake.”
I said yes before I’d fully decided to.
On Sunday I stood outside the house on Linden Avenue, the one Paolo and Elena had lived in since before Dante was born, holding a wrapped book about Venetian glass I’d found at the used bookstore near my apartment.
I had walked through that door a hundred times carrying serving platters, seating charts, backup candles, the replacement cake when the bakery got the frosting wrong.
I had never once walked through it carrying only a gift.
Nico opened the door and stopped short. “Vivienne. Hey. You look... good. Different.”
“Thank you, Nico.”
“Ma said you might come. I didn’t think you would.” He stepped aside awkwardly, then leaned in to lower his voice. “Heads up, it’s kind of a mess in there. Nobody knew who ordered the cake.”
The kitchen was chaos. Elena’s sister Carmela was at the stove stirring something that smelled scorched.
Two cousins were arguing about whether the good tablecloth was in the hall closet or the dining room sideboard.
The roast, I could see through the oven window, had gone in far too late.
Someone had set the table with the everyday plates and then someone else had half-replaced them with the good china, so every setting was mismatched.
Every instinct I had rose up at once. The tablecloth was in the sideboard, bottom drawer, under the Easter linens.
The roast needed another forty minutes and they should serve the antipasto first to buy time.
The cake came from DeLuca’s on Fordham, and it had been ordered, by me, on a standing annual order I’d set up the second year of my marriage, which meant it was almost certainly sitting in DeLuca’s walk-in refrigerator with Paolo’s name on it waiting for someone to pick it up.
I stood in the kitchen doorway with my wrapped book and my hands at my sides.
“Vivienne!” Carmela turned from the stove, visibly relieved. “Thank God. Where does Elena keep the...”
“Carmela.” Elena’s voice came from behind me, crisp. “Vivienne is a guest today. Find it yourself.”
Carmela’s mouth closed. I turned. Elena stood in the hallway in a gray dress, her hair set, her expression unreadable. She looked at me for a long moment.
“The cake,” she said. “Is it DeLuca’s?”
“It’s DeLuca’s. There’s a standing order. It’ll be under Paolo’s name.”
“Nico,” Elena called, without taking her eyes off me. “Go to DeLuca’s on Fordham. There’s a cake under your father’s name.” And then, to me, more quietly: “Thank you. Go sit down. Paolo’s in the den.”
It was such a small thing. She’d asked me one question and sent me out of the kitchen. It was also the first time in seven years she had ever told someone else in that family to leave me alone.
Paolo was in his recliner in the den with the baseball game on mute. He tried to get up when he saw me, and I told him not to, and he took both my hands and held them for a long time without saying anything.
“You look well,” he said finally.
“I’m working again. At a gallery.”
“Good. Good.” He squeezed my hands. “You always had more in you than that house used.”
Dinner was late, as I’d predicted, and louder than usual without Dante at the head of the table to anchor it.
Paolo sat in his son’s usual place for the first time I could remember.
Someone had seated me beside Luca and across from Carmela, and I understood within the first course that this was going to be the difficult part of the evening.
Carmela had never been cruel, exactly. She was simply a woman who said the first thing in her head and assumed everyone else found it as interesting as she did.
“So,” she said over the antipasto, leaning toward me with real curiosity, “is this a trial thing, you and Dante, or is it actually over? Because Rosalind said...”
The table went quiet. One of the younger cousins suddenly became fascinated by her olives.
“Carmela,” Elena said from the far end of the table. “That isn’t a conversation for this table. Or for you.”
Carmela turned to her sister-in-law. “I was only asking what everybody’s...”
“I know what you were asking. Pass the bread.”
Carmela passed the bread. The conversation moved, clumsily, to Paolo’s hip. Luca caught my eye and raised his eyebrows a quarter of an inch, and I looked down at my plate so I wouldn’t laugh or cry.
The rest of the dinner wasn’t comfortable.
People didn’t know what to call me or how to talk to me.
One of the older aunts kept patting my hand and saying poor thing under her breath, as though I’d been widowed.
A second cousin asked whether I’d be keeping the house in the divorce, and when I said I didn’t know yet, he looked disappointed, as if he’d been hoping for gossip.
For once no one asked me to do anything or where anything was kept.
Twice I caught myself half-rising to refill a water glass before remembering I wasn’t the one responsible for water glasses anymore.
Nico came back with the cake at eight. It was exactly the cake I’d have ordered, lemon with raspberry filling, Paolo’s favorite, his name in blue script on top.
Elena carried it in and set it before her husband, and everyone sang, and Paolo blew out one candle for each decade because Elena refused to fit seventy-three candles on a cake.
Afterward, while I was getting my coat from the hall closet, Elena appeared beside me.
“Would you give me five minutes?” she asked. “In the sitting room.”
I nearly said no. Then I followed her.
The sitting room was the formal one, with the piano nobody played and the silk sofa nobody sat on. Elena closed the door and stood by the window. She didn’t sit, so I didn’t either.
“My son came to see me,” she said. “After you left.”
“I assumed he might have.”
“He told me that I’m no longer welcome in his house without an invitation.
He told me that if I speak about you the way I have in the past, at any family gathering, he’ll leave and he won’t bring anyone with him when he does.
He meant it. I’ve known him thirty-seven years. I know when he means something.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
She looked at me, and for a moment I saw something I’d never seen in her before, a woman unsure of her footing.
“I want to explain myself,” she said. “I’m not sure you’ll accept the explanation. But I’d like to give it.”
“Go ahead.”
“When your father and Paolo made that arrangement, I thought it was a mistake. I had nothing against you in particular. I objected to the marriage. It was political. It was about ending a feud. I thought Dante deserved better than a wife the family had purchased for peace, and I thought you understood that as well as anyone. You were twenty-two. You knew why you were there.”
“I did know why I was there. At twenty-two.”
“And Alessandra...” Elena’s jaw tightened slightly.
“Alessandra was practically raised in my kitchen. I held her when she was born. Her mother was my closest friend. I watched her and Dante grow up together, and yes, I wanted them to marry. I wanted it for twenty years. And then it didn’t happen, and instead he married a stranger for a treaty, and I suppose I decided that was something he’d have to manage on his own.
He’s a grown man. His marriage was his business. ”
“Was it?” I asked. “Because you made it your business every Sunday for seven years.”
She didn’t answer.
“Let me answer those one at a time,” I said, and my voice was steadier than I expected.
“The marriage was political at the beginning. I never pretended otherwise. But it stopped being political a long time ago, for both of us, and you watched it happen. You saw him hold my hand under your dining table. You saw him sit up with me through pneumonia. You knew exactly what it had turned into. You just refused to let it count.”
Elena’s lips pressed together.
“Alessandra being practically family. I understand that. I never asked you to love me the way you love her. I asked you, silently, for seven years, to stop using her to remind me I wasn’t.
You told the raft story at dinner. You toasted at Sal’s party.
You said some people find their way back where they belong, in front of two hundred people, with me standing right there.
Call it nostalgia if you like. You knew what you were doing. ”
“And Dante being able to manage his own marriage.” I took a breath. “He couldn’t. He didn’t know how. Nobody taught him, because the one person who could have shown him how to defend a wife against his own family was you, and you were the one he needed defending against.”
The room was very quiet. Out in the dining room someone laughed, and a chair scraped.
Elena looked out the window for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice was lower.
“You were always so composed,” she said.
“Seven years, you never once lost your temper with me. I kept waiting for you to. I think part of me wanted you to, so I could say, there, you see, she isn’t suited to this family.
And you never did. You just kept arranging the flowers and remembering everyone’s birthdays and being gracious, and every year you were more a part of this family than I wanted you to be.
” She turned from the window. “I used your outsider status against you. I knew I was doing it. I told myself it was harmless reminiscing. It wasn’t.
I did it because I never accepted that he’d married someone I hadn’t picked. ”
It was more honesty than I’d ever had from her. I stood with it for a moment.
“Thank you for saying that,” I said.
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.”
“Good. Because I don’t. Not tonight.” I picked up my bag. “I might someday. I don’t know. But I appreciate that you said it out loud instead of just following whatever rules Dante set and calling that enough.”
Something moved at the corner of her mouth. It wasn’t quite a smile.
“You’d have made a formidable Moretti,” she said, “if we’d let you.”
“I was a formidable Moretti, Elena. You just never looked.”
I opened the door. Behind me she said, quietly, “He’s different. Since you left. I’m not saying it to push you anywhere. I’m saying it because I’ve watched him thirty-seven years and I’ve never seen him like this.”
“I believe you,” I said. “I don’t know yet what I’m going to do about it.”
Luca walked me to my car. We didn’t talk. At the curb, he kissed my cheek and said, “Ma sent Carmela into the kitchen. I’m going to be telling that story for years.”
I laughed all the way home, and cried a little too, and by the time I climbed the three flights to my apartment I wasn’t sure which one I’d been doing more of.
* * *