I felt noble, picturing the pagan children with clothing and without lice, and I waited for my mother to help the children, too.
But she didn’t. “Religion,” she said to the sisters, “is only valid when it has to do with compassion, not with forcing your belief on—”
“Not now, Leonora.” My aunt started apologizing to the Sisters. “I’m sorry, but my sister-in-law, she’s been ill.”
“It’s arrogant to teach these African children that your God is better than theirs.” My mother’s eyes blazed. Trashing religion did that to her.
“My sister-in-law gets those migraines that—”
“For us,” my mother added, “charity is close to home this year.”
“If that’s all we are to you, Leonora, charity…” Aunt Floria began to cry.
“That is not what I said.” My mother pressed her fingertips against her temples. Her nail polish was chipped.
“We all do the best we can to be charitable in this earthly world,” the older nun murmured hastily.
The other nodded. “In the eyes of our Lord, each act of charity is a prayer.”
My mother shivered.
“I didn’t want to do the tickle game,” I confessed to the nuns. “The twins jumped on top of me and—”
But the nuns didn’t glance at me. They were fretting about the chalices at their church. “Those chalices won’t last much longer.”
“Because they’re worn so thin.”
“Like a child’s fingernails.”
When my father came home with a carton of groceries, the nuns were long gone, and Aunt Floria had piled her belongings in the hallway. He had to climb around them to find her in the kitchen, where she was pacing between stove and ice box, trailed by the scents of mothballs and fish.
“I’ll move out, Victor, right after I feed you and your family the seven-fish dinner. Mama says she’ll take me and the girls in.”
Already, I could see myself back in my own bed. In my own room. Kevin and I are building bridges from Lincoln Logs. A crane with a real motor from my Erector Set.
“Let’s talk this over, please.” My father set the carton on the table. From the hesitant way he unbuttoned his coat, I could tell he didn’t want Riptide finding out about the troubles between Aunt Floria and my mother.
“Your wife—” Aunt Floria started.
“Great news,” he said quickly. “That squirrel I told you about…it ran from the storage room today and out through the kitchen.”
“Your wife doesn’t want me here.”
“One: that is not true.” My mother stood in the kitchen door, the belt of her robe knotted around her waist. “And two: I have a name.” She was talking in the frosty-slow voice I didn’t like.
“Charity, Victor. That’s all I am to your wife. She was ready to call a cab for me before you got home.”
“Your sister ordered me to call her a cab.”
“So now your wife has money to waste on cabs?”
“On an entire fleet of cabs.”
My father held up both hands as if to stop an entire fleet of cabs.
The twins were leaning against the wall between the two windows: Bianca with her thumb in her mouth, pupils rolled up slightly; Belinda with both arms around the rabbit.
“Why don’t we wait till tomorrow,” my father said, “and then decide what to do?”
I stared at him. How could he, now that they were finally ready to leave?
Aunt Floria shook her head.
Let her go, I prayed silently. Let her go.
My father stubbed out his cigarette. “At least till tomorrow, Floria? It’s getting dangerous to drive with all the snow.”
“I have encouraged your sister to stay, Victor. I have tried to do my best with this…this situation.”
“I have tried harder than your wife.”
“I guess your sister wins. Again.”
“I have a name too.”
My mother groaned. “I can’t do this.”
Bianca’s mouth made sucking noises around her thumb, while her other hand rubbed the side of her cape where the satin was frayed.
My father looked absolutely helpless.
Let her go. Let her go. Let her go. My prayer was becoming music inside my head, vibrating against my temples to the melody of: Let it snow. Let it snow. Let it snow.
“What are you humming, Anthony?” my father asked.
Everyone was staring at me.
I trapped my lips between my teeth. Let her go. Let her go. Let her go.
My father pulled a stencil kit from the side of his carton and held it as if he couldn’t resolve what to do with it. “If you stay…the children can do glass-wax decorations together.”
“But it’s mine!”
“Anthony—”
“Mine alone.”
Belinda set Ralph on the floor and got to my father the same moment I did.
But he handed her the stencil kit. “Don’t be greedy, Anthony.”
Mine alone.
Already, the twins were yanking my stencil kit open: comets and bells and snowflakes cut from thick transparent paper, holly branches and Christmas trees.
“For the children’s sake then, I’ll stay,” my aunt allowed.
Above us, the white blades of the ceiling fan were motionless.
“You go lie down, Leonora.”
“Yes.” My mother started toward her bedroom. “Of course.”
“I’ll bring you a bowl of pea soup once I unpack,” Aunt Floria called after her.
“Toastmaster Mixmaster breadbox,” my mother recited. “Pope cardinal malted-milk machine…”
“Pope cardinal Toastmaster Mixmaster…” I whispered. “Malted—”
When she shut the bedroom door behind her without swearing at Aunt Floria, I knew it was up to me to restore my family. Otherwise my father would let the twins and Aunt Floria live with us forever, and my mother would get thinner and whiter till she’d vanish in the white bedding.
“Girls, you share with Anthony now.” Aunt Floria lit a cigarette.
“You too, Anthony. Share.” My father headed toward the bedroom.
But when I picked up the stencil of a bell, the twins edged me aside, and I wanted to take them by the shoulders, shove them out of my apartment, toss their dolls and earmuffs out behind them.
My aunt poured pink glass wax into a saucer, and the twins fought over that until Belinda managed to push one end of the dry sponge in it. While Bianca mashed the comet stencil against one kitchen window, Belinda squished the sponge into the comet’s tail. At first it was gloppy, the stomachache pink of Pepto-Bismol, but as it dried it turned paler until it was the color of deep snow after blood has seeped through it. There’s something odd that happens to the surface of snow after blood has fallen on it. If the snow is loose enough, blood will trickle to the bottom, leaving an almost white surface and, below it, layers of pink that get darker the farther they are away from you, until it looks as if a red lightbulb were shining up from within the snow. The one other time I would see anything similar would be the following winter, on Castle Hill Avenue, when the family in the house attached to my grandparents’ would set up an electric nativity outside. After a snowstorm, Mary and Joseph would be covered to their waists, and between them, where Baby Jesus used to lie in a manger with real straw, a glow would come rising through the snow. All together it would be different, of course. Still, I’d start crying, because it would get me thinking about Bianca again—I wish I’d never have to see snow again—about how she lifted her stencil and looked disappointed because some glass wax had seeped beneath, making her star messy. All wrong.
“All wrong,” I told her.
“Less wax,” Aunt Floria advised. “Remember now—take turns while I unpack our things.”
Belinda grabbed the stencil of a bell and kept it flat against the window, while Bianca dunked the sponge into wax and swabbed it against the glass. From the living room came thuds as Aunt Floria and my father hoisted
her stuff back onto the dark fire escape. I could tell the twins were not about to offer me the stencils, but I no longer wanted my turn, because I knew what we would look like from outside if Santa were to watch us. The three of us. Here. Together. Forever.
To separate myself from my cousins, I pulled a chair to the other window and knelt on it. In the snow, the water tower on the Paradise became the huge lizard beast, and on Kevin’s roof, the antennas became people with hats waiting to cross the street. I pressed my forehead against the icy glass, and as I watched the lights of cars and trucks far below on the white street, I hoped the twins would be gone before New Year’s Eve, my favorite holiday, because at midnight we’d put on coats, open the windows, bang spoons against the bottoms of pots in the cold air, and yell, “Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New Year.” All through my neighborhood, people would lean from their windows—the O’Deas and the Casparinis and the Weissmans and the McGibneys and the Rattners and the Corrigans—all of us together, kids and parents, all banging pots, all yelling, “Happy New Year…”
Not nearly as careful as the television girl, Belinda and Bianca were slopping pink wax on their window, stringing holly branches and comets and bells into garlands that looked like smudges someone had left by mistake, and I felt cheated for ever having wanted the kit.
“Girls,” Aunt Floria called, “did you put that rabbit back in the tub?”
“You go,” Bianca said.
“No,” Belinda said. “You.”
“Girls…”
“Anthony can do it.”
“No. The person who just yelled will do it. You, Belinda. Now.”
Belinda scowled at her sister. At me. “Don’t touch anything till I come back,” she warned, picked up the rabbit, and started for the bathroom.
Snow whirled into my face as I opened my window.
“Not supposed to,” Bianca said, shoving herself next to my chair.
Icy wind snaked between my sleeves and wrists. “Listen…You hear that?”
“What?”
“Your papa.”
“Where?” Her forehead was flushed, her voice eager. “Where is he?”
“Playing his accordion.”
“Where? Papa—”
“On Kevin’s roof. Sshhh.” I touched one finger to my lips and tilted my head as if, indeed, I could hear Uncle Malcolm playing his accordion. Whenever I think back to that moment when I didn’t stop Bianca from climbing on the chair with me, that moment when I first knew that I, too, was capable of being Elsewhere, of moving on the shadow side of all that is good, I can indeed hear my uncle’s accordion, faintly, then swelling inside my soul. But that is now. And that evening it was silent, except for the muffled squeak of wheels on snow.
I raised my hand and pointed. “Over there.”
When Bianca—arms hooked through the straps of her satin cape, elbows angled for flight—turned toward me, the warm strawberry breath from her candy lipstick struck my face. “Is it true, Anthony?”
I faltered.
“I really can fly to my papa?”
I still wish I could say I believed that Uncle Malcolm stood on Kevin’s roof, playing his accordion, wish I believed that my cousin could indeed fly to him—if not every day, then at least on this eve of miracles. But I did not believe any of that when I told Bianca, “Yes.”
Leonora 1955
Annulments
Leonora spends the afternoon of her husband’s engagement party in her bed with James, the grandson of Mrs. Hudak from downstairs. James has dark curly hair, and he works as a waiter at a downtown restaurant where he has to wear a tuxedo. But this afternoon, James is not wearing anything, and as he moves beneath Leonora, his face flushed, she feels distracted by images of her husband: Victor tiling the kitchen floor on his knees, his dungarees stretching over his firm ass; Victor balancing the checkbook for Festa Liguria, cursing as he discovers an error; Victor in front of the mirror dabbing one finger against his beardless chin; Victor kissing the throat of a woman whose voice Leonora would recognize.
Her friend Mustache Sheila has asked her if she’s curious what this Elaine looks like, and Leonora had told her she’s not. Still…she pictures Elaine as a blonde with small earlobes. For three months Leonora has known about Elaine, but not about the engagement party—not until Anthony mumbled something about needing new shoes.
“But I just bought you sneakers.”
He pulled at his fingers as if yanking off invisible gloves.
It drove Leonora mad, seeing him like that, mad and worried. But she kept her voice gentle. “What is it now?”
The bones of her son’s face lay so close to his skin they seemed to shine through, bluish white. He was receding from her. From the entire family. Often he went without speaking for hours, unless she forced him to say words.
It took him two days to tell her: “Dad says I can’t wear sneakers to his engagement party.”
James’ hands take hold of Leonora’s hips. “Almost—” he pants and turns with her till they lie on their sides, still joined. “I’m almost there.”
Just about now Anthony should be sitting at a long table with Victor and Elaine and assorted members of both families. An odd concept—getting engaged while still married. Though Leonora has offered Victor a divorce, it’s not what he wants from her. Victor wants an annulment, so that he and Elaine can have a proper wedding in front of a priest, exchanging eternal vows, the same vows Victor exchanged with Leonora twelve years ago. Perhaps one word will be different—“love” instead of “live”: “As long as we both shall love”—so that Victor can move on to someone new when this love, too, wears thin. Once you have left one marriage, Leonora suspects, it becomes easier to leave a second marriage. Easier yet with the third and the ones after that. Already, she can see a lineup of her husband’s future wives, arranged behind a one-way mirror the way Jack Webb arranges a lineup of suspicious persons on Dragnet and questions a witness: “Look closely now. Is there anything you recognize about these individuals?”
For herself, Leonora does not want to imagine a next husband.
A lover, however, is a different matter.
James prides himself on being a fantastic lover. He has told Leonora so. “I’m a fantastic lover,” he said. But then he spoiled it by asking, “Right?” Still, it’s true: sex is something James is very good at. Fantastic. Victor can get sort of Catholic around pleasure, but James is inexhaustible in exploring new angles.
James likes change: he has worked at a radio station, a grocery store, a garage, a bakery, and several restaurants. He wants to get back to being a dog breeder; but if you ask him what kinds of dogs he has bred, he’ll admit to having owned one cocker spaniel. For a while. “With excellent papers. I was about to expand my kennel when I received this offer to work for a radio station in New Jersey and left the dog with friends in Queens….”
What’s constant in James’ life is that he always returns to his grandmother, who won’t let him pay rent. He is kind to his grandmother. Leonora remembers thinking that when James was just twelve and washing the outside of his grandmother’s windows. When he hopped from the ladder to help Leonora carry Anthony’s baby carriage down the front steps, he stared at her with the eyes of a man, not a boy, and she laughed, feeling vibrant in the post-pregnant lushness of her body, amused to envision her place in this boy’s fantasies—for him she is the first woman ever—and as his greedy eyes fastened on her swollen breasts, she teased him, “What a beautiful boy you are,” never anticipating that nine years later he’d become her lover.
Leonora keeps count of their different positions in bed, delighted with her body, the body of a woman whose lover is far younger than she, this lover who has been staring at her ever since he was a boy. How she enjoyed making him blush by smiling at him. Until he grew up and no longer blushed but still stared at her. Like that morning Victor moved out with his cartons and suitcases while she stood in the bedroom, incapable of walking. Afraid she’d stay frozen in that one
position, she made herself set one foot forward, then the other, out of the room and out of the apartment and down the stairs, determined to keep going till she no longer had to concentrate on each step. In the lobby, James was leaning against the wall by the mailboxes as if waiting for her, and she stared right back at him.
They didn’t speak as he followed her up the stairs, climbing through layers of fresh and stale smells that drifted from apartments as if they were traveling through various countries: fish on two, though it wasn’t Friday; cinnamon on three, where it usually smelled sweet from baking; on four, chicken soup, gamy after simmering too long.
They didn’t need to speak as she led him into her bedroom, because their fantasies overlapped as though they’d watched themselves countless times in a movie of their own making.
The first time Victor returned to the apartment, Anthony locked himself into his room.
“Don’t you want to go to the zoo?” Victor shouted through the solid door.
No answer.
“Afterwards I’ll take you to the White Castle…get hamburgers with lots of chopped onions.”
While he was coaxing Anthony to come out, he whispered to Leonora, “I’ve spoken with Father Bonneducci. Father says the church has become more lenient about annulments.”
She motioned him away from their son’s door. “How can you annul a marriage when there is a child?”
“That’s what I asked him, too. But according to Father Bonneducci, it’s done quite frequently.”
“You just nullify a child then?”