“Stop it, Michael,” she says, pulling herself up from the ditch, the table, martini in hand, her manuscript under her arm. She walks across the floor away from the tables and into the dark bar. She opens her manuscript. She rubs against a man’s gray shoulder. She’s so beautiful. I all turns toward her and runs his hand up her textured leg. I can see all this, Fletcher; I suppose Father sees it, too.
“Eat your dinner now,” he says to Fletcher and me. “It’s going to get cold.” We cut our meat for Father. We put vegetables in our mouths. Dessert comes. We spoon soft puddings into our mouths though we think we w ill be sick. My mother’s hand rests between her legs. She is shifting on the bar stool, but the bar is dark and I hope I am the only one who notices this movement. She rubs the neck of another man. My father buries his face in his hands. “Leave me alone,” my mother says to the man. “Just keep your fucking hands off me,” and she walks back to us.
She bends down and gently kisses my father on the cheek. “Oh, Michael,” she whispers. She hurries her tongue into his ear. She wraps her arms around his shoulders. “Christine, stop it,” he says. She turns from him abruptly, rubs my back and plays with my hair, pushing it to the top of my head.
“Fletcher,” she says, sliding next to him, “would you do something for Mommy? Would you please, please?” She tilts her head.
“OK, Mom,” he says. “OK.”
“Pick out the prettiest woman in this restaurant for me.”
He is afraid not to do what my mother asks. “I don’t know, Mom,” he says, and he looks at his shoes. “I can’t pick.”
She sighs and he looks up finally and says, “I guess she’s pretty, Mom.” He points to a tall, thin, dark-haired woman who sits with her boyfriend. She must be about twenty.
“Ah, you’ve got very good taste,” she says, smiling at him. “What’s the matter, Michael? Do you think I won’t? Do you really think I won’t do it?
“Fletcher, get up,” she says, staring the whole time at my father. She takes my brother with her and introduces herself to the young couple, and because she is so commanding and confident, so powerful now, at the height, in fact, of some strange power, they are seated in seconds next to the young woman and her boyfriend. My mother smiles. Fletcher looks over at us. My mother takes a cigarette from the woman’s pack, lights it, and hands it to her. She lights one for herself. My father’s eyes swell as my mother, two tables from us, admires the woman’s dress.
“Mommy,” I say, “don’t do this. Please come back.” My father looks at me. There is no stopping her, his eyes say.
“They say I am one of the greatest liv ing American poets,” my mother says suddenly in a loud, agitated voice. “Come to my reading,” she laughs, leaning into the woman, “and make up your own mind. There will be a party afterwards,” she says, moving her hand toward the woman’s. “There are always parties.” The young man is entranced with her, too. The woman blushes. My mother is irresistible.
We walk down the street to the Guggenheim. “God damn it,” she yells. “Fuck. Oh, fuck,” she calls into the posh evening air. “Oh, Christ.” She is crying. She is wrestling with something right before our eyes. She focuses suddenly on me. I reach for her hand and she slaps mine.
“You don’t love me at all,” she screams. “You don’t care if I live or die. None of you! No, neither do you, Vanessa,” she cries, pushing me away from her. “Don’t pretend you’re any different from the rest of them. Go to hell. Go to hell,” she shrieks, running way ahead of us. “And don’t come in with me. Don’t you dare.”
We wait out on the sidewalk for what seems a long time. “OK,” my father says in a voice which is hardly a voice at all, and we step into the outer room of the museum where others who could not get tickets into the auditorium stand. There are loudspeakers set up. The young woman and her boyfriend are there. They wave to us. Fletcher waves back weakly, then stares down at the ground. There is silence over the public address system, then a buzzing, then footsteps, my mother’s shoes, an adjustment of the microphone, a few coughs from the audience, a bit of rustling, then silence. I imagine my mother just stands there in front of the microphone and stares out into the audience. It seems like forever. My father closes his eyes. We hear the rustling of pages, silence, then her voice, finally her voice. She begins without introduction, and as she reads the first line her voice grows—grows and grows with each word—loud, secure, catching fire, furious and pure.
“You don’t love me at all,” my mother rages. “You don’t care how much I suffer. You don’t care if I live or die! None of you do! Neither do you, Vanessa. Don’t pretend you’re any different!” She is throwing things around the house, shoes from the window, books, jewelry. “You’ll be sorry,” she screams. “You’ll all be sorry someday. Especially you, Vanessa Turin. Go to hell,” she shrieks, exploding into a million pieces.
“No, Mother,” I say, standing up, sobbing now. “Who do you think you are? Come back here,” I demand, “right now. Do you think you can just disappear like that? Come back,” I yell. “Mother,” I shout into empty space. “Do you think you can explode into a million pieces and disappear?” I scream into the silence my voice makes, into the horrible void that is everywhere.
Anything would be easier than seeing her this way, I think. I turn away again in my hard bed and watch the mist as it moves in on the wings of morning like an angel, like a dove.
On the day of the Bicentennial, July 4, 1976, my grandmother got up unusually early, about 4:00 A.M., unable to sleep. The country would be celebrating its two-hundredth year this day in a grand way, and she had felt some of that excitement in the nursing home where preparations had been going on all week. Banners had been made. Songs had been practiced, the tenors and baritones and the multitude of sopranos getting together to rehearse their parts. Tiny flags had been purchased to decorate wheelchairs, and red, white, and blue crepe paper, to be threaded in the wheel’s spokes. The kitchen staff had made little strawberry shortcakes and had dyed the whipped cream blue. And my grandmother, the first one up, was making her own preparations, it would turn out—a different sort of independence.
In celebration, tall ships would be sailing down the Hudson later in the day. There would be elaborate fireworks displays in the evening. We asked Father if he would go to the festivities with us, and, liking water and ships of any kind, he agreed. “But we should go see your grandmother first,” he said with a certain resolve. He did not like to visit her alone. God doesn’t send us a cross heavier than we can bear, she had always said, but in the years since my grandfather’s death she had seemed to stoop further and further into the ground with the weight of it, growing more and more bitter and resentful of everyone but particularly of my father, who was not my grandfather and never would be.
“Sure,” we said, and so we went early that Fourth of July to visit Grandma, sometime near dawn.
I drove. I was just learning to drive. “Use the low beams in mist,” Fletcher said from the back seat. Though Fletcher was younger than I, it was clear that he had been driving for a long time. The early morning mist was thick and I followed his instructions. Slowly we plowed through the haze to Grandma.
I was doing well: adjusting the lights, using the brakes and the blinkers, but nearing the nursing home I saw such a bizarre image, a picture of such eeriness in (he fog that I had to wipe my eyes to ensure I was awake, and, lifting my hands from the steering wheel, the car swerved. Fletcher leaned forward to help.
“Look,” I said, pointing. “Look.” Father stared straight ahead and said nothing. Fletcher looked up.
In front of us through the early morning mist we saw what seemed to be an old, old woman, or the ghost of a woman, dressed in a strange, elaborate costume and posed on the large front lawn of the nursing home.
“That’s Grandma,” I said.
“No,” they said, “it’s not.” They did not recognize her this way.
“Yes,” I whispered, “that’s Grandma.”
“How could it be?”
She was tiptoeing about the grass now, checking her stage, testing the light, bending and stretching in preparation. She waved to us and smiled. “My family,” she said. We stood at the edge oí the lawn and waved back—Father, too. “My family,” she smiled.
I looked closer, still not trusting my eyes. A red rosary hung around her neck. She wore a long skirt. Beads and other trinkets were sewn into it—beads from necklaces my grandfather had given her and she had never worn: crystal beads, beads of ruby-colored glass, mother of pearl. She wore a white peasant blouse, made hurriedly from a sheet, probably secretly. She had pulled the hair away from her face and made braids that she pinned up on top of her head. Attached to the braids were red and white streamers that flowed behind her when she moved. She looked like a little girl.
“Vanessa,” she said, and she made a full turn for me slowly so that I might not miss anything: the intricately sewn costume, the beautiful hairdo with streamers, the red rosary. I wiped my eyes again. She turned once more and what I saw this time was the girlishness in her motion, the joy, the thrill; yes, it was joy I saw in her turned ankle! She pranced to one corner of the lawn, picked something up, and brought it back with her. It made a lovely sound. It was a tambourine she had made from tin pie plates, yarn, and bells.
“How inventive you are, Grandma! We never knew!”
She was humming something softly to herself—a beautiful, melancholy melody. I trembled, freezing suddenly on this July morning. She hummed louder and then began to sing. Her feet seemed to lift off the ground completely as she began her lilting, graceful, lighter-than-air dance. She took three steps to the right, slowly raised the tambourine and tapped it lightly, then three steps to the left, then a twirl. Instead of her regular black tie shoes she wore ballet slippers. When I saw her tiny feet in those slippers, I felt like going up and hugging her, but I did not dare disturb the dance; I was afraid that she might turn back into the old Grandma if I moved even one muscle. I held my breath.
“I never dreamt it would all come back so easily,” she said, and there was a lightness in her voice, a giddiness we had never heard before.
She moved more quickly now, having been bitten, I imagined, by the tarantula of Italian folklore, the spider with a venom so potent that it had made her people crazy for centuries with the irresistible urge to dance.
“How graceful you are, Grandma!”
She smiled at us. “We used to make our own pasta,” she said sweetly in her new singing voice. A weight had lifted from her. “We used to make little tortellini, ravioli. We used to make our own wine and olive oil. There were mountains there.”
She was surrounded by home. It wrapped around her finally with large, comforting arms—not our home, bannered and lit with fireworks, but hers.
“Oh, Grandma,” we said, “why didn’t you ever make us those little tortellini? Or tell us about the mountains? Why did you keep it all from us?”
Strains of familiar songs could be heard coming from inside the nursing home—“I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “America the Beautiful.” There was much excitement inside. Some were dressing to leave for the day—off to backyard celebrations. Others were getting ready for the geriatric parade of wheelchairs and walkers. Sparklers had been promised.
Grandma stopped suddenly and looked directly at us. “Your grandfather never let me speak Italian in the house,” she said. “He never let me cook my own food. I missed that so much,” she said in the loneliest voice I had ever heard. “He never let me sing you to sleep with the sweet songs from Italy I loved so much.” My father put his face in his hands.
I thought of my grandfather as a young man in Italy straining toward some idea of America. I thought of him coming here, his dreams of being a real American—eating steaks and eggs, wearing good shoes, making a life—and then another idea, some time later, something quite different, though unmistakably American, too.
A marching band could be heard somewhere in the distance.
“Oh, Angelo!” she said, looking to the sky. “I could have made an Easter torta for the children. I could have sung them the songs my mother sang. There were so many songs to sing.”
“Mom,” my father said. There were great tears in his eyes. “Why didn’t you say something to him?”
“It was not my place,” she said sadly.
“Oh, Mom,” he said. He walked slowly to her. “I never knew,” he whispered to her, looking into her darkened eyes.
“Mother,” he said, squeezing her ancient hands in his. “We’ve wanted the same thing all along. Why…” His voice trailed off. He kissed her hands and rubbed them against his face. “Why? Why have we fought?” he asked. She shook her head, lowered it.
“My bambino, my beautiful, curly-headed bambino. You had the most beautiful curls.”
My father turned to us for what seemed the first time in his life and gestured for us to come forward and enter the circle he and his mother had made with their arms. We hugged each other, all four of us. I ran my fingers through my grandmother’s hair and streamers.
“My children,” she whispered, “my children.” I felt our arms around her. She would die in the afternoon of this embrace. She was making her peace with us and with the world at the last moment—and we with her.
“Grandma,” I said, “I like your shoes.”
“Oh,” she said, looking at them and pointing her toe. “I’ve been saving these shoes for a lifetime.”
“Grandma,” Hetcher said, “that’s a nice tambourine.”
“I made it in crafts,” she said. “You know, my people always loved music. My father played the mandolin like an angel.”
On hearing this something rose in my father like an anthem and he began to weep uncontrollably and embraced his mother tighter.
“Michael,” she said, “I’m so sorry.” And he nodded. His head was pressed against her bosom, which seemed larger, more maternal somehow, softer. My father left his head on that wonderful place for a long time; when he finally looked up, her face was lined suddenly with the past.
“We used to eat these,” she said, bending over and plucking a dandelion from the green lawn. “We used to like these very much. A simple weed. We cooked it with garlic and olive oil and a few flakes of red pepper. We ate weeds and we were happy.”