“We’ll go now,” his mom said. Where? thought Vincent. Where would they go? Would they leave his dad alone here? What if the machines all went off at once? What if there was a power failure?
“Where are we going, Mom?”
“Well, home, I guess. I mean, I guess I’ll take you to Laurie’s and then I’ll come back here and sit with Daddy. You can’t stay up all night….”
Vincent began to cry. “I want to stay here with Dad. I don’t want to go to Laurie’s. I have to take care of Dad….”
“Shhhh,” said Beth, as the old person’s voice began quavering. “What’s that? What’s the goddamned racket?”
“I’ll take care of Dad,” said Beth, pulling Vincent to her for an instant. He pulled back. His mother smelled, she really smelled like…he could almost remember the smell, like the kind of cologne Grandpa Angelo used to use, maybe he still did, the kind that reminded Vincent of an old jewelry-box lining. She smelled as though she’d dipped her head in it, and it was weird, because his mother only ever smelled of Noxzema. She didn’t even have any perfume that Vincent knew of. But before he could sniff her again, Laurie’s husband, Rick, appeared and took him by the arm.
“Let’s go with Laurie, okay, big buddy?” Rick said, winking over Vincent’s shoulder at his dad. As Rick pulled him away toward the doors, Vincent saw his mother kneel down by the bed again and heard her whisper, “Paddy. I’ll go anywhere. I’ll do anything. The restaurant with your Dad. We can do that. I…want you to. Just get better, Paddy. Don’t die on me. Don’t die.”
Now she’s sorry, Vincent thought. She always wanted to kill him, and now she’s sorry she almost killed him. Or maybe just pretending she’s sorry. That’s nuts, he thought. But what if she really had done it on purpose, like a curse? What if his dad had died right there in the alley, and Vincent had to go home alone with her, forever, and his dad was never going to come back, never be with him?
And what if one day she found out? About stuff? He felt the tap again in his tummy, the scratch, scratch of fear as he stared at the black back of his mother’s matted curls, almost purple in the underwater hospital light. He had to tell himself that even when she squeezed him, or yanked on the back of his neck, she wasn’t trying to hurt him, just her hands were. Her hands were rough. Sometimes she looked at him as if she wanted to lie on top of him, like a blanket. At those times, her hands were as gentle as a dental hygienist’s, feather hands.
But if she knew…For a long instant, he had no doubt that if that ever happened, she would kill him, too. She would have no choice.
Beth
CHAPTER 15
October 1990
It was not possible.
The first time she’d walked into the derelict bindery that was to become Wedding in the Old Neighborhood, Beth had thought, This is a pit, this is a hole, so dank and forbidding it could drive Pollyanna to Prozac. Pat and his dad are going to undertake a slow double suicide to distract themselves from the reality of a family diminished by lost fathers and lost sons. It was nothing but a useless barn with graffiti-savaged tin walls in the middle of the west side’s toughest frontier, a neighborhood in which only a few bold gay men had begun to stake claims on crumbling brownstones.
One of those men was the designer Beth had met that day months ago—a set designer of national reputation who also “did” theme bars and restaurants.
Did he “do” illusions, like David Copperfield? Beth had wanted to ask. She’d swallowed the remark; since Pat’s heart attack, she’d swallowed so many unspeakables that one day they would probably rise up and choke her. Nevertheless, magic was what this transformation was going to require.
And there was no other word for it. Magic. In six weeks.
Beth had never seen anything quite like what had happened to the old warehouse. It was like a dream tour of the Italian imagination. Room opened upon room—one fashioned to resemble a wine cellar, with casks running wall to ceiling, labeled “Ruffino,” “Conterno,” “Catello di Amma,” cunning droplets of paint to represent spilled wine trailing down the walls. Elaborate plaster scrollwork framed the alcoves, with mottoes painted in colors of putty and sky blue. The tables in this room were rough cypress, spread with shawls and abutted by barrel-cask seats. In an alcove, a polished bar was nearly concealed, and a passage to the kitchen. It would be open for lunches, Pat explained, and for overflow on the three nights each week that the actual “weddings” took place.
Pat led Beth next to the more formal bar, where a ceramic model of the Fontana di Trevi, coated in marbleized paint and more than five feet tall, took up the length of one whole wall. Each booth in the bar was made to look like a rose-trellised gazebo; each seated six. Behind the bar, bolts of satin in dove gray and rose were draped and caught with silk roses. Actual petals—Angelo got them for pennies from his buddy Armando, a funeral director—would be scattered like a carpet on the floor each night.
The real triumph was the banquet room itself. Vaulted beams of polished pine made the ceiling look like the Duomo in Florence, and the painting that would cover the whole thing (a painter was up there now, Michelangelo-like, on his back on a suspended platform) would be on the theme of the seasons—marriage being, after all, the commencement of a wheel of birth and harvest.
“What are those for?” Beth asked, pointing to black wrought-iron balconies, six of them, tucked in at the corners of the beams.
“They’re for people,” Pat began, throwing up his hands at her look. “Don’t ask me. It’s my father’s idea that there should be goddesses or something in them. This is what I really want you to see.” He strode over to one wall and pulled a protective tarp. Beth literally jumped. She was looking at her own face.
“You’re Mimì,” Pat said, with the kind of uncorked delight she hadn’t seen in him since he played Colt league. “And I’m Rodolfo.” Slowly, he led her through the rest of the frescoes—some were not yet completed. Besides La Bohème, there were depictions of scenes from Carmen, Madama Butterfly, and more, each character a Cappadora family face. They were painted with a diaphanous technique that made not just the opera paintings but the walls themselves look hundreds of years old.
“How did he manage this, in so short a time? It looks like years of work. Oh, Paddy, it’s gorgeous!”
Pat was shining. “It is, isn’t it? We were so right to get Kip. This place is going to knock their socks off…And wait till you see the brides and the bandstand and this—and this, Beth….” He tugged up a corner of the drop-cloth that covered the floor. Beth gasped. The entire floor was parquet inlaid in a mosaic, deep burgundy around the edges radiating in to the twenty-four-foot face of a woman in profile. Her forehead and crown, above her olive cheek, was draped folds of cloth, created of varying shades of blond and yellow oak, so sinuous they seemed to move.
“Oh, Pat,” Beth whispered. “The hood of gold.”
“This is where we’ll have the tables at first. And then, when it’s time to dance, see, the tables just roll back…into this alcove thing. When Kip brought up putting the mosaic on here, I thought, This is too much. I thought it would be so garish it would be a joke.”
“No, it’s lovely. Lovely. But how will you ever let anyone walk on it?”
“No problem,” Pat said with breezy delight. “We had a guy who does gym floors coat it. There’s so much polyurethane on it you could drive a Zamboni over it.”
“And will everything be ready for the opening?”
“It kind of depends on Dad.” Pat hooked a finger at a table shrouded with plastic near the entrance, where Angelo sat in animated discussion with the designer. “They can’t get together on the foyer. It’s a big deal to Dad.” In his baseball cap and cutoff shorts, Pat looked, Beth thought, maybe twenty. He looked not just rejuvenated but reborn, as if his life had a pure, unclouded focus, for once his very own, into which he could pour all his energy and creativity and tenderness. The idea for Wedding in the Old Neighborhood had been born the night of Jill’s wedding,
late at night, after most of the guests had left the back banquet room at Cappadora’s in Madison.
Jill’s wedding had been held not very many months after Beth had returned, after a fashion, to work. Returning to work had been so monumentally consuming for her that she could barely face Jill’s moving out. Jill knew things Beth didn’t know, like the names of Vincent’s teachers and the parents of his friends; she was the one who made it possible for Beth to do what little she could with the children and still spend hours dabbling in the solitude of her darkroom, laboring to finish things she’d once been able to do with her mind on autopilot.
The whole family, in fact, had begged Jilly to hold off on marrying Mumit, a mahogany darling from Bangladesh she’d met only four months before. She was too young; they were too poor. Jill shrugged them all off; and that night at Cappadora’s, truly radiant, she’d swept off with her groom to a brief honeymoon in Door County before Mumit started graduate studies in chemistry.
“You have to admit, they’re happy,” Tree had said a few moments later. “It was a beautiful wedding. Don’t you wish you could go to a wedding like this every week? The dancing and the ice sculptures? The dresses? I wish I could have gotten married four times.” She’d looked at Joey then. “To the same guy, of course.”
That’s when Angelo had begun to scribble on the leftover napkins, scrolled with the young couple’s names in gold leaf. He had been telling Pat for years that he was sick of the run-and-hustle of Golden Hat Gourmet. He wanted to preside over a place in his last years—to work beside his son and son-in-law in a crown jewel of a restaurant. Theme restaurants—part eatery, part theater—were springing up all over Chicago: fish joints with swimming mermaids behind glass built into the walls; rib houses housed in old filling stations, where the corn and garlic bread were delivered on trays fashioned from old hubcaps.
Why not an Italian wedding? he’d asked Pat, then Joey. Why not an Italian wedding, maybe three, four nights a week, with a bride and groom as the host and hostess? “With family style at each table, mostaccioli and meat-balls, big loaves of bread—you’d save a ton on plating,” Joey put in, excited.
“And a band—you’d have a band and a dance floor!” Pat cried. “The bride and groom, we could hire these kids who are trying to break into show business, you know, like kids who work at Steppenwolf or Second City, really beautiful kids. And they’d do the first dance….”
“Bellissimo!” cried Angelo. “Imagine it!”
“It’ll never work,” Augie grumped. “Too much overhead. What’ll you do when she tears the dress the first night?”
“We could work out stuff,” Pat shot back. “Arrangements with the tux and gown rental places. Free advertising. Stuff that’s going out anyhow. Who cares about the style? It might even be better if they were a little vintage. We could buy up the bridesmaids’ dresses you see for cheap in the paper—Dad! All the wait staff could be the bridesmaids and the ushers….”
When Beth, limp with exhaustion, took Vincent and Kerry home at two a.m., the men and Tree were still talking, pounding the table, making fresh coffee and pouring shots of anisette. In the car, Rosie said, “There is no fool like an old fool.” But she was smiling.
Even so, deep down Beth had never truly believed the battle to move back to Chicago would really be engaged. And once engaged, she’d never believed it could be won. As she saw it, Pat was lucky they had established a fragile ecosystem in Madison. The press hounding had died down; Beth was bringing in money with her portraiture and photo editing. From what she could observe, the children seemed healthy: Kerry had learned to talk and walk more or less on schedule; from the light that burned under the crack in his door late at night, Beth discerned that Vincent had learned to read chapter books to himself. She and Pat even had a semblance of a social life, occasional decorous dinners with Rob and Annie Maltese, and she still went to Compassionate Circle meetings with Laurie almost every other month.
Beth mentally dug in her heels. Pat would no more be able to convince her to move back to Chicago than he would be able to get her to dance topless in the Capitol rotunda. She would move to Chicago over her own dead body.
She had not counted on the prospect of refusing over Pat’s.
She had not counted on what had happened the weekend of Candy’s wedding. The weekend of her lunch with Ellen and Nick. The weekend of the second red shoe at the twentieth reunion. The weekend of Pat’s heart attack. The weekend of Beth’s sin.
Looking back, Beth could see that it had really all been decided, in the few seconds it took Candy when she had called to tell her that the alarm on her biological clock had sounded, and she and her old pal Chris had picked the first Saturday they could find open on their mutual calendars. There would be a blowout party afterward, and they wanted wonderful pictures. Imagine me a June bride, Candy hooted, and Beth, to her own surprise, caught the spirit, started razzing Candy about whether she and Chris had tried the bed voyage, and had it been rough sailing? No, Candy had screamed, laughing—she’d just closed her eyes and pretended he was Jessica Lange!
Beth drifted through raw-smelling piles of green wood and unassembled white-laminated slabs that would be tables in the soon-to-be-completed restaurant. Given everything that happened the weekend of Candy’s wedding, moving had almost been an anticlimax. Really, not bad at all.
Even the house, which Tree had chosen for them (Beth refused to even go and look), was not so bad, though located not five minutes from the Tremont Hotel, smack in the middle of the neighborhood where all of them had grown up. Even the children were better than they should be. After Pat told him the “good news,” Vincent had disappeared for three hours. Pat had been sick with fear, but Beth was calm. She did not think anything serious would ever happen to Vincent. He had a tough hide. Once he’d thrown a bowling ball out a window and caved in the porch roof when Beth made him go to bed; he’d set off fireworks in the shell of a house under construction, and started more playground fights than Beth could count on both hands. And yet, she thought, if not thriving, Vincent was more or less okay. Maybe being around Angelo would help tame him. Joey had been a wild kid when he started working at Golden Hat; Angelo had turned him into a good kid.
Now with the men still deep in debate over the foyer, Beth drifted back outside and sat down on the ornate stone steps that had first caught Pat’s eye. The rest of the battered brick exterior had been stuccoed in cream; wrought-iron grillwork and a sign were to go up next. She watched a gaggle of little black girls performing fast-footed double-dutch tricks on top of a carpet of shattered glass in the parking lot across the street.
Turning her face up to the hazy sunlight, she let herself drift back, five months—just five months—to the weekend of Candy’s wedding, the weekend that had resulted in Beth’s mortgaged vow to come back to Chicago forever.
Not half an hour after Beth had arrived, Ellen had suggested the lunch. Her husband and Nick Palladino were working together on rehabbing an old women’s college in Hyde Park, turning it into a sort of cluster mall and day spa; Ellen had been gabbing on the phone with Nick when Beth arrived.
“Three guesses who’s here,” she trilled into the telephone. And then Beth, all unprepared, was talking with Nick, asking about his children, laughing about his running into Wayne on a casino boat in Indiana. Ellen interrupted to ask why they didn’t just talk in person; they could have lunch and then Beth could see the site at the college. It was gorgeous, what Nick was doing marbling the interiors. Beth found herself agreeing to plan a brochure.
Why not? Beth wasn’t due to show up at Chris’s South Shore penthouse for the wedding reception until eight that night, and she’d given herself so much time to get to Chicago—fearful that she could no longer read road signs and remember how to pay tolls—she’d arrived before ten in the morning.
“We’ll goof around all afternoon and you’ll still be a few minutes from the reception. You could even change in Dan’s house trailer. Come on, let’s make it a giggle,
Bethie,” Ellen had said. “It’ll be fun. We’ll go to Isabella on the Drive.”
Beth had taken leave of her senses. She’d agreed.
But when she and Ellen pulled up in front of the cafe’s discreet sign, Beth felt the thump and shift of the avalanche, heard its creak. “It’s in a hotel,” she’d whispered to Ellen. Ellen looked genuinely panicked.
“I didn’t think…” she began. “Oh, Bethie, I didn’t even think of it! Haven’t you been in a hotel, ever? Ever since?”
“No,” Beth breathed.
“Not even when you go to New York?”
“Bed-and-breakfast places,” Beth said, measuring out her syllables. “Always.”
“We’ll just leave then,” Ellen said reassuringly, starting the car. “I thought if it wasn’t anywhere near where the reunion is…”
“The reunion,” Beth said.
“You know, the twentieth reunion. It’s this weekend. Didn’t they mail you…oh shit, I guess they wouldn’t.”
“It’s this weekend?”
“Yes, but Beth, that doesn’t make any difference at all. I wouldn’t go. Wayne, nobody would go. It just happened to be this weekend.”
“Where?”
“In Elmbrook.”
Beth put her hand over her mouth. “Oh God, Bethie,” said Ellen. “Just forget it. I’ll run in and see if Nick’s there and we’ll grab some deli and eat in a park. Okay? Will that be okay?”
But then, Nick appeared around the corner of the old hotel, his tightly curled black hair dusted with gray now, his suit as crisp as a silhouette cut from gray paper, and something in Beth’s abdomen uncurled like a lazy cat.
“My God,” she said to Ellen. “Look at him.”
“He never gets old,” Ellen agreed.
“What…what the hell.” Beth suddenly got out of the car and ran into Nick’s welcoming arms, kissing his mouth, which smelled of cloves, for just a millisecond too long.