Wild Roses (29 page)

"You knew this. You knew and it didn't even
matter to you. Someone just goes and makes up his whole history and this doesn't
bother you?" Nothing would matter then, it seemed clear. This was my mother's
life, and my life. Nothing was going to change if she didn't have limits of what
she would tolerate. I would have to make some decisions. I grabbed my pillow and
held it. Put my face down inside. Dad could turn down the heat of his house. Mom
couldn't turn down the heat of hers.

"Honey," she sighed. She sat down next to me,
just sat there in silence for a while. "Dino needed that history Needed it. And
it made those people happy. They're part of something bigger than the life they
have there. I understood that."

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"Why? Why would he need it so bad? Someone just
needs to go and make himself up?"

"Dino was born Dino Tiero in the inner city of
Milan." "Tiero? They're related?"

"They're brothers. They were desperately poor.
God, Cassie, they were so poor that they once had to eat a rat that William
caught. Can you imagine that?"

"No," I said. "It's still no reason to lie like
that. Being poor . . ."

"His mother was a prostitute. They never knew
their father. They saw their mother hanging on the shower rail when he was
fifteen. Suicide. He and William found her."

"Oh, my God."

"A teacher, Giovanni Cavalli, had already given
him his first violin a few years before. He taught Dino to play. Dino had a
natural talent. That part was true. William got him jobs, and the playing kept
them alive. Dino changed his name to honor the man who saved his life. William
kept pushing, pushing Dino to greatness. They were always running from
ghosts."

I was quiet. I felt horrible and cruel. Life
could be so beautiful, and it could also be this mess of confusion and cruelty.
I didn't know where to begin untangling things.

"I'm sorry," I said finally.

"Cassie, I'm not saying this excuses all his
behavior. Just explains some of it."

"Why didn't you tell me before?"

"He didn't even tell me any of this. William
did. Dino's doctor did. Dino fired William after he had Dino
hospitalized.

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He thought he was ruining his ability to
create."

"I just don't get it. People would understand.
I would have understood. Maybe there would be more compassion for him. He didn't
need to worry about the truth."

"I guess sometimes things seem too awful to say
out loud." I guess she was right about that. I still hadn't told Ian the truth
about what was happening at home. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you. I wanted to
protect him, I wanted to protect you. He wanted to protect his mother. He didn't
want the world to know her that way."

"I wanted to protect you," I said.

"Oh, Cassie." She looked so, so tired. She put
her arms around me. "That's my job," she said. "To protect you. And I'm not
doing it well enough."

I hugged her too. "All this has been hard," I
said.

"How did you find out about Dino? We don't even
know for sure if Edward Reynolds discovered the truth, though I think he had to
have. Every magazine and newspaper reporter since has taken their information
from that book."

"Dad found out."

"What? Dad?"

"He was worried about you." "None of this is
his business." "Don't be mad at him. He did it out of love." Mom sighed. Shook
her head. "All the things," she said. "Done out of love."

Karl Lager: Well, then the concerts in the
piazza started every Saturday morning. Do you understand what that did to
my

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business? No one went into the store for an
hour or more. They came to listen to that horrible child, not to buy
peaches.

Father Tony Abrulla: I will confess I am glad
he did not choose Sunday! I was just an assistant then, to Father Minelli. I
close my eyes and still hear that music. It brought the people of Sabbotino
Grappa together as one. For a few hours, this small boy kept Mrs. Salducci and
Mrs. Latore from fighting. Even Frank Piccola came outside and stood to listen,
and the threat of hell couldn't make him leave his house for Mass on Sundays.
Maybe he was depressed. We didn't have depression, then, of course, that we knew
of.

Maria Lager Manzoni, grocer's daughter: Father
finally gave me Saturdays off. Let me tell you a secret--that's when my Pia was
conceived. Eli and I held hands through that child's sweet and tender playing,
went home with passion. We barely closed the front door.

Honoria Maretta: No child was ever mine like he
was. Like a son to me. I loved that boy.10

Here is what I remember about the rest of that
night.

Dino puts a coat around my mother's shoulders.
His own smells of cigarettes, like the boys in detention. I tell him I am sorry,
but it is really more the sadness of his life I am expressing compassion for,
rather than my anger at him earlier. There is too much between us for that. And
too much that he's done that cannot be excused by the past. Still, I feel bad
for the pain he felt. The pain he continues

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to feel. Maybe he chooses not to see me, as he
has chosen to stop seeing other things in his life.

My mother drives. Dino sits in the passenger's
seat. I see in the reflection of the glass that his fingers are moving in the
air, on the strings of the violin that rides in its case in the
trunk.

We take the ferry, stay in the car. I have seen
Dino perform only once before, and Mom has seen him several times, but it was
never like this. Never a release of new work after so many years, never so much
riding on the outcome. Last time he was not nervous, but now his edginess
infuses the atmosphere. Mom turns on the radio, but Dino switches it off. She
helps him straighten the wings of his bow tie, then he flips the visor down and
studies it in the mirror. Unsatisfied, he undoes it, ties it again. His hands
tremble. I smooth the velvet of my dress again and again with my hands. I think
about Ian, who in a few months will board an airplane for Philadelphia, but will
tonight be somewhere in that audience. I think about how everyone is just a
small person on a big earth in a bigger universe. I think about how everyone
struggles to do the best they can in this imperfect place.

We arrive at the concert hall early, of course.
We are backstage, where there is the chaos and noise of people and instruments
and bright lights. My mother knows a few performers there, and I can see her
watching Dino with sideways glances even as she speaks to them. Dino is using
grand gestures and a big voice, but he is sipping water and once again I see his
shaking hands. A violist asks me questions

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about school that I answer as I smile with a
politeness that tries hard to hide my impatience. I feel like I am talking to
her forever, as she tells me what a shame it is that our schools do not make
music programs a priority.

Mom rescues me. She whispers that she feels
underfoot, that they want to practice a few measures. The conductor looks
relaxed, laughs a lot. She tells me that he will be good for Dino, and that we
can go get a coffee. I guess we could use some Optimism in a Cup right
then.

We go out into the lobby, where it is mostly
quiet still, and where there are huge posters of Dino staring out at us wherever
I look. It reminds me of The Great Gatshy, which we read in English last
year--something about that big sign that signifies death, or something or other
that I can't quite remember. We find a coffee stand, share a latte, eat a
biscotti, so that Mom must go to the bathroom again to fix her lipstick. By the
time the audience begins to arrive, she will have made four trips to the
bathroom, not that I can blame her.

It feels like we are waiting forever. My feet
hurt in those damn shoes. Whoever decided that high heels were a good idea for
women should have had to wear them every day of his life, which would be
punishment enough. Everyone smiles at my mother, and my own face hurts from so
much smiling. I keep looking around for Ian, but know that with all the people
there it will be unlikely that I will see him and have the chance to talk to him
about getting into Curtis. The ushers arrive, and Mom decides to go backstage
and check on Dino one more time before

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the show begins. I go back to the bathroom for
lack of anything else to do, and to avoid the stares of the Dino posters. His
hair is swept back from his face in them, silver and black, and he looks
handsome and intense. It occurs to me that he is someone I know, someone I live
with. But do I really know him? Anything about him, except the way he wants me
to walk down stairs, turn a faucet off, close a door? This strikes me as
sad--what a stranger he and his life are to me. In the bathroom, I wish for a
vice--smoking, drinking. My best vice, Hostess Indulgence, sounds stomach
turning and hugely lacking in vicely power at the moment. The bathroom has the
paper towels stacked in a basket, and I wonder how long they will last before
the dispensers with the twirly narrow handles will have to be used.

The bathroom begins to pack with perfumed women
in sequins and big coats. I leave to find that the lobby is filling fast, with
rushing people and lingering people, people in heavy jackets and others fanning
themselves with their programs. It's amazing how loud it is in there, after the
several hours where the only noises were footsteps on carpet. In spite of Dino's
complaints about his venue, I know that the hall is one of the best for sound, a
building built within a building to keep the life of the street out. Now in the
lobby, we are standing in the middle layer, the protective
atmosphere.

Mom comes out again, finds me looking out of
the glass wall into what is now night. It's dark and has been raining, and the
street is glossy. Cars are jammed up all

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along the road, and a light turns red and
someone honks. In every one of those cars there is a story, or a hundred
stories. For every light on in all of those huge city buildings, there is a
story. No one knows what I am about to face, no one knows my story, and neither
do I right then. I think about Ian and I scan the crowd for his face, and kick
myself for not making a plan to meet him somewhere here. This place, a night
like this, will be his place, too, his night. I wonder if his hands will shake
as he takes a sip of water before his performance.

Mom grabs my arm. It's the second time she's
done that. She tells me we have to hurry, that we should be seated by now. We
walk past the ushers and down the sloped, carpeted ramp. Some of the family of
the other performers stay backstage, but Dino has always preferred his support
in the audience. I know from Mom's own performances that when you look out from
a lit stage, all you can see is a blackness, the sky without stars. You wouldn't
even know there were any living beings out there. I guess it's nice to know that
there is something familiar and loving in that sea of darkness.

We travel down the rows of seats and I am lucky
I don't fall on my ass in those shoes. All of those people in their suits and
fancy clothes, holding hands or whispering to each other or reading their
programs and scanning the names of all of the contributors to see which of their
friends gave money, all of them are here to see Dino, to say that they saw him,
to be able to tell the story tomorrow and in the days to come. You can feel the
excitement in

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the air, in that reserved way of people in an
elegant place--all good manners and shifting sideways to maneuver past each
other and whispered excuse me's.

We sit next to that weasel Andrew Wilkowski,
and some other woman who is from the recording company, I think. I can smell her
perfume from where I sit, one of those sorts that are not sexy so much as
stalking. The strong odor jars me out of the nervousness that I feel, this
psychic-hyper communication that Mom and I have going between us, anxious
electricity. The perfume is helpful because now I am just plain annoyed, and the
annoyance puts me in full fault-finding gear. The woman has a little run in her
stockings right at the point of her ankle. With any luck, we'll see it zip up
her leg like a spider crawling up a wall.

I look behind me. Every seat that I can see is
full. Every one. No one is even in the bathroom. I know that somewhere behind
me, Siang Chibo sits with her parents. I know that Ian is there with his mother,
tickets given to them compliments of Dino. I wonder if they can see me, if their
eyes are on me. People in the front row turn to us and say things to Mom, shake
her hands. They are probably the people whose names you see in the program under
contributors, the ones who have been in our house on Thanksgiving. We are in the
second row by choice--my mom hates sitting in the front row. She says that all
you get is a view up Dino's pant leg, but I don't understand how this is any
better. If I had my choice, since I had to be there, I would rather sit in one
of the overhanging pods, those special boxes that remind you of

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ladies with piled-up hair and opera glasses, or
maybe of President Lincoln being shot, but Dino doesn't like us in the
balconies. Better yet, I'd sit in the farthest back corner. I'd put my coat
around me, close my eyes, and pretend I'm listening to him on a CD. The idea of
him on the stage in front of us is too intense. It'd be more comfortable
watching the surgery channel on a big-screen TV This is not some stranger giving
us a show--we will bring home his success or failure. We will live with the
largeness of this event for days, the monumental fact of this one man with these
people in his hands.