Across the Table

Across the Table

Linda Cardillo

Bellastoria Press

ACROSS THE TABLE

Books by Linda Cardillo

Dancing on Sunday Afternoons

True Harvest

Two Mothers: A Saigon Pilgrimage

Across the Table

Love That Moves the Sun

Italian Tales

The Smallest Christmas Tree

First Light Series

The Boat House Café

The Uneven Road

Island Legacy

A Place of Refuge

Catríona’s Vow

ISBN: 978-1-959102-23-6

ACROSS THE TABLE

Copyright © 2010, 2020, 2023 by Linda Cardillo

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Bellastoria Press, P.O. Box 60341, Longmeadow, MA 01116.

Across the Table is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Third Edition

Bellastoria Press

P.O. Box 60341

Longmeadow, MA 01116

Chaconia Flower Image ID 141184340 © Puripat Penpun | Dreamstime.com

In memory of my aunts,

two of the women of Rose’s generation

who influenced and inspired me

JoAnn Porzio Petrillo

1926 ~ 2020

Rita Camardella Porzio

1927 ~ 2020

Contents

ROSE

1939-1946

A Lifetime Ahead of Us

Motherhood

1945-1946

Reunion

Homecoming

Paradiso

1947-1955

Miami

A Piece Missing

1961-1966

The Last Full Table

Loss

Broken Glass

Rose

1969

Emanuel

Good Friday

Rose

1972-1980

The Wedding

Raising Sons

Changes

Rose

1980-1981

Disintegration

Toni

1980-1998

Safety

Return to the Neighborhood

The Sketchbook

Vanessa

1998

Freshman

Dangerous Games

Toni

1998

The Commission

An Open Book

Rose

2009

Epilogue

A Message from Linda Cardillo

Across the Table Discussion Questions for Book Clubs

Read an Excerpt from Dancing on Sunday Afternoons

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ROSE

1939-1946

A Lifetime Ahead of Us

Iheard the screen door slam shut against the wooden doorjamb and the crunch of Al’s work boots on the conch shell fragments that surrounded our cottage a quarter mile from the Chaguaramas airfield on Trinidad. It was 5:00 a.m. The tanagers that nested in the mamoncillo trees beyond the field where we enlisted men’s wives hung our laundry had just begun their morning song.

I rolled away from the empty hollow on the bed where Al had been sleeping only fifteen minutes before. The sheets were damp with his sweat. Nothing stayed dry in that climate. I figured I might as well get up too, put on a pot of coffee and get started with the cooking before the temperature started to climb. Thanksgiving Day and it was already seventy-five degrees outside. It would rise to one hundred and twenty degrees in the shade before the day was over. Al had hung a thermometer for me just outside the bedroom window so I’d know as soon as I opened my eyes how hot it was. I’m not sure why it mattered to me so much, but it helped. Gave me a little piece of knowledge that let me feel some control over my life. Hah!

I wrapped myself in the navy blue embroidered kimono Al brought me last year when he was on furlough at Christmas and he managed to get back to Boston for ten days. It seemed like a ridiculously impractical gift at the time, the middle of winter in the Northeast. I was wearing flannel nightgowns and wools socks to bed, for God’s sake.

But then he’d asked me to marry him. Al and I had been keeping company since we were in high school. He was a year ahead of me, one of my brother Carmine’s friends.

The ring was in the pocket of the gown.

What’s this? I asked, when I felt something hard and lumpy against my heart. I had just put the kimono on over my powder-blue sweater set in my parents’ living room.

I slipped my hand into the pocket and retrieved a velvet box.

Open it, Rose. He was sitting on the edge of his chair. He had his uniform on, the petty-officer stripe he’d earned a couple of months before neatly arrayed on his arm below his Seabees construction insignia. He looked sharp, my Al did.

I held my breath as I lifted the hinged top of the box. Inside was a diamond sitting high on four silver prongs. I let out a quiet gasp and my eyes filled up—for all the nights I’d lain awake, wondering how he was doing so far away, building an airbase as the world descended into war. Trinidad. Al told me the U.S. Navy had leased territory there from the British because of its strategic location in the Caribbean, a base for planes that escorted convoys and patrolled the sea lanes. I had to go to the library to look where it was.

My nose started to run. I was a mess. Tears streaming down my cheeks, me sniffling. Who knew this was what love does to you.

Will you marry me, Rose?

We didn’t have much time. There was no way I was going to let him go back to Trinidad for God knew how long before we could walk down the aisle at St. Leonard’s. Neither one of us wanted to wait. We talked to my folks that very night. They were wary about the rush.

Mama got me alone in the kitchen for a few minutes.

Rosa, be honest with me. Are you gonna have a baby? Is that why you gotta go to the priest so fast?

No, Mama, no! I swear on Nonna’s grave that I’m as pure as the snow that’s falling outside. It’s just—I can’t bear for him to go away again. The navy will let me go with him if we’re married.

He’s gonna take you away to that island! Your papa will not agree to that, Rosa. You belong here, with the family. It’s too far. Too strange. Another country.

Mama, you left your parents to go with Papa to another country when you got married. America was a lot farther away from Italia than Trinidad is from Boston. Please, Mama. Understand. I love him. I waited already, worrying about whether he’d come back alive. I don’t want to wait any longer. Talk to Papa. Give us your blessing!

Mama put her hands on her hips and looked at me, measured me. She was from the old country, but she’d been in Boston a long time—thirty years.

"I didn’t want to leave back then. It broke my heart to say good-bye to my family. I was pregnant, don’t forget, with your brother Sal. But the last thing I wanted was to be separated from your papa. I had seen too many men leave the village alone and get lost in America, find another woman, forget the family they left behind. I was scared, but I knew I had Papa to depend on, protect me and the baby. With his skill as a stonemason, he knew he could find work in America. But when we left, my mother cried and cried as if it was my funeral. I won’t do that to you, figlia mia. I’ll talk to Papa."

She made the sign of the cross on my forehead and went to talk to my father.

We got married on New Year’s Day. I wore my mother’s veil and my sister-in-law Cookie’s dress. My best friend, Patsy, stood up for me. It snowed the morning of the wedding. Huge flakes came in off the harbor and by the time we went to church there were three or four inches on the ground. I had to put on galoshes and hold my skirts up as we walked the two blocks to St. Leonard’s. Thank God, Father Giovanni had gotten somebody to shovel the front steps. My cousin Bennie, with the voice of an angel, sang the Ave Maria. Instead of his overalls covered in granite dust, Papa had on his good black suit and waited in the back of the church while I changed my shoes and Patsy fixed my veil. She licked her thumb and wiped away a fleck of soot that had settled on my cheek. I peeked through the little glass panes in the doors and could see Al up at the altar in his uniform.

I bit my lip, squeezed Patsy’s hand and then took Papa’s arm. I stepped across the threshold and headed into my new life.

After the Mass, we went to a restaurant on Salem Street that had closed for our private party. It wasn’t elaborate, the meal; after all, it was still the Depression, and the rest of the world was at war. But they did a nice job for us—escarole soup, manicotti, a cacciatore made with rabbit, fagiolini and broccoli rabe on the side. The wedding cake came from Caffe Vittoria, but the cookies Mama baked herself. It took her three days. Mostaciolli, anise cookies, pignoli cookies, honey fingers. She even managed to find sugar-coated almonds, and I sat up with Patsy two nights before the wedding and wrapped the pastel-colored nuts—blue, green, pink, lilac—in circles of white netting that we tied with thin strips of white satin ribbon as wedding favors.

Al and I spent our wedding night at the Parker House. They brought us a bottle of champagne and a fruit basket on the house because Al was a serviceman. I’d never had champagne before. It was New York State, not French, of course, because of the war. It wasn’t what I expected. But then, most of what has happened in my life wasn’t what I expected.

The hotel wasn’t far from the North End, but it might as well have been a foreign country. Very old Boston, with a snooty bell captain and a dowdy lounge. Not that we wanted to spend any time there. It was all we could do to get up to our room and get the key in the door we were so excited. I was nervous, with a lot of butterflies in my stomach. I’d hardly eaten anything at the reception. I’d been busy moving from table to table, kissing and being kissed, thanking everyone as they slipped their envelopes into my hand and I put them carefully into the satin and lace borsa that Mama had carried on her own wedding day. We didn’t count the money until the next morning. We had other things on our minds that night.

Although she’d given birth to seven children and therefore had to have known something about the sexual side of marriage, Mama had offered me nothing in the way of preparation. Her only advice to me was, Don’t ever go to bed angry. When you fight, make up before you fall asleep.

But right then, I couldn’t imagine fighting with Al. I’d known him since we’d been kids and never in all those years had we ever said a sharp word to each other.

My sister-in-law Cookie, in addition to handing me down her dress, had given me a smattering of advice, although I tried to avoid the image of my brother Carmine doing to her what she was trying to describe.

It was the first time I’d ever even seen one, she said of her wedding night. You’d think, growing up with five brothers, that sooner or later I’d have caught a glimpse. So it was kind of a shock. Try not to react too strongly when you see it, ’cause men are very sensitive about that. Try not to worry or build the whole experience up into something that’s got to be perfect the first time. More than likely it won’t be. But it does get better. And she smiled this knowing, secret smile and patted her belly. She was just starting to show.

So we made it into the hotel room with these goofy smiles on our faces. We looked at each other and then Al swooped in, picked me up and carried me to the wing chair by the window and sat down with me on his lap. We looked out at the city, coated now in a thick blanket of snow that softened the edges of everything and hid the shabbiness.

It was magical, that whiteness. The world seemed fresh, unmarred by weary footprints. A good omen for us, I thought.

Al nuzzled my neck in the spot he had discovered when we were sixteen and he first kissed me. He had started with my lips, but then moved to cover my face with his kisses— my eyelids, my cheeks, my earlobes and then, right below my ear. It sent shivers through me then and he’d known ever since that was how to make me melt.

He lingered there for a few minutes and I leaned back against his chest. All the nervous energy that had gotten me through this frantic week dissolved into his tenderness and strength.

Oh, Rose, he whispered.

And then he began to unbutton the twenty satin-covered buttons that ran up the back of the dress from below my waist to my shoulder blades. I knew he wanted that dress just to slide off me like the waterfall in the middle of the island he’d described for me—heart-stopping ice-cold water plunging from cliffs so green you thought they’d been colored by a child-giant with a box of crayons.

But there were so many buttons! Not only up my back, but on the sleeves as well, marching up to my elbows. Painstakingly, one by one, he slipped the loop fastener over each button to release it. While he unbuttoned, he continued to nuzzle my neck, his breath hot and urgent against my skin. Finally, the buttons were all undone and he drew the bodice off my shoulders. I stood and let the whole thing drop to the floor and then turned around to face him in my bra and slip and panties.

I had a negligee in my suitcase that I’d bought at Filene’s the day after Al proposed, all filmy white nylon with pale blue flowers embroidered around the neckline. But I could see in Al’s eyes that I wasn’t going to put it on that night.

Those eyes swept over me from head to toe and back again, coming to rest on my breasts. He broke into a broad grin.

You’re beautiful, Rose!

It brought tears to my eyes, how adored I felt at that moment.

He picked me up again and carried me to the bed. Nothing Cookie had told me prepared me for the rest of that night—for how I felt lying against the pillows, watching him undress; for all the revelations about my body and his that followed; for the absolute peace of sleeping in his arms.

As he stood by the bed, removing layer after layer of his uniform, the stiffness and formality gave way to the soft curl of black hair against the smooth browned muscle of his arms and chest. The work he had been doing on that tropical island had given him a sleekness and a strength I’d never seen in him before, not even when we’d gone to Revere Beach during the summers we were in high school. He wasn’t a boy anymore, not in his body, not in the way he wasn’t embarrassed to have me watch him, not in the way he touched me when he slipped into bed next to me. I wondered—fleetingly—if he’d gained that confidence from being with another woman. But he dispelled any doubts I had about being the only one in his life from that moment on by his tenderness and his passion. His patience with the buttons had only been the beginning of his willingness to take it slow for me.

We didn’t sleep much that night. It was as if we had to fill ourselves up with each other, fill that emptiness that had gnawed at us all the time he’d been away. We finally fell asleep early in the morning, the sheets twisted around us. I woke up first, disoriented by the strange bedroom. I eased myself out of the bed to wash up. There was a bit of blood, but not as much as I thought there would be. I looked at myself in the mirror over the sink. The bride who had anxiously bit her lip and walked with nervous hope down the aisle was still there. We still had a lifetime of unknowns ahead of us. But one of the questions had been answered for me during the night. I had that certainty—don’t ask me where it came from—that if things were okay in bed, a couple could weather whatever else life threw at them. We were going to do alright, Al and I.

We couldn’t afford more than one night at the Parker House, so we spent our last night in Boston and the second night of our married life at Al’s parents’ apartment. My mother-in-law, Antonella, invited my parents over for dinner. We had spent the day walking around the city, arm in arm, Al helping me over the snow banks, as we talked about the life ahead of us. God willing, the war would end before the United States got sucked into it, and we could have a life.

When we got to my in-laws, my cheeks were red from the cold and I took a lot of ribbing from both families about being the blushing bride. Al just took me in his arms with a grin and planted a big one on my lips in front of everybody. Then everyone had to kiss me.

We finally sat down to eat. Al’s mother is Calabrese, so her cooking is slightly different from Mama’s. She made tripe in a pizzaiola sauce and her own fettucine. Papa had brought a jug of Chianti filled from the cask in our basement, the wine made from my uncle Annio’s grapes that he grew in his garden in Everett. The toasts were endless, each family raising their glasses to our safe journey, long life and many babies. The meal was raucous, a celebration but with an undercurrent of melancholy as the evening wore on and our mothers, especially, anticipated our departure the next day. Nobody wanted to say goodnight. But at last, Antonella, Mama and I cleared the table and began washing up and putting the kitchen back in order. By eleven, with another round of kisses, and, by now, tearful embraces, my family headed down the stairs. I went to the front windows, Al’s arms around my waist, and watched them walk down the block. Before they rounded the corner, Mama turned around and looked back. I threw her a kiss, but I don’t think she saw me.

We sailed early the next day, first to Miami and then on to Trinidad. Off in the distance we could see the escort ships protecting us. We weren’t allowed to photograph them, a reminder that even on this side of the Atlantic, the world was a dangerous place. I was seasick the whole twelve days of the trip, throwing up in the cramped stainless steel toilet in our cabin. When we had a practice emergency evacuation drill I crawled up to the deck with my life jacket on, but at that moment, I didn’t care whether I lived or died, I was so sick. When I finally heard the tug horns indicating we were in the harbor, it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.

Little by little, I made a home for us on Trinidad. The first thing to adjust to was the heat. We were practically sitting on the Equator. But I pinned my long hair up on top of my head and made a few sundresses out of some cotton I found in a shop in Port of Spain. But before I sewed the dresses, I cleaned.

The cottages assigned to the married couples were newly built, like the airfield Al and his platoon were carving out of the peninsula. But left empty for even a few months they became overrun with wildlife, large and small. Our cottage had two rooms, plus a small kitchen and a lavatory. The shower was outside. When I first saw our home, I hadn’t held down any food to speak of in over a week and I was covered in a layer of dust from the open jeep ride from the harbor to the base. The sweat was pouring down my neck, leaving a trail of narrow brown rivulets.

Inside the cottage cobwebs hung from every corner, the husks of giant beetles and unidentifiable insects trapped in the sticky silk. Something had made a nest under the kitchen sink. Geckos slithered along the edges of the floor. If there had been a clean place to lie down, curl up and cry, I would’ve done so in a heartbeat. But there wasn’t. So I put my bags down on the porch, dug out a housedress and a bandana to tie up my hair and put my hands on my hips.

You got a broom, some rags and a bucket? I said to Al. God bless him, he scrounged around while I changed and came back with some basic necessities. He told me he had to report to his commander and then left me for the afternoon.

I put all my years of Mama’s training as a housekeeper in use that afternoon and for days afterward, sweeping and scrubbing that place till it was something I could be proud of. It was my first home, after all; but let me tell you, it wasn’t like anything I’d ever imagined.

The blue of the sea, the purple of the bougainvillea, the red of the chaconia trees—I’d never seen anything like them. The colors of the land, the smells of the sea and the flowers, everything was heightened by the heat and the moisture. The same was true of the food—the tastes were both strange to me and exaggerated, when I set out to find us something decent to eat.

The base had a commissary where we could get tins of evaporated milk, peas, potted beef and Spam. But I longed for fresh, so soon after I arrived I walked down to the little village that was halfway up the hill between the base and the harbor. I’d seen chickens pecking around a yard the first day, and vegetables I didn’t recognize growing in a field. I knocked on some doors, talked to the old Mama who had the chickens, and walked away that first day with a basket of greens, some eggs, and a packet of spices—cardamom, cilantro, some dried chili peppers.

They eat spicy in Trinidad. I knew Al was used to Calabrian cooking and that was spicy, so I gave a try with the local things. If I had to open another can of Spam and make it into something recognizable, I thought I would shoot myself. Or we’d both starve.

But fresh eggs I knew what to do with. I had some potatoes and onions and made a nice pan of frittata, with the greens on the side. Al came into the house and smelled the familiar aromas. He ate that night with gratitude and pleasure. By the time Thanksgiving arrived, I’d had almost a year to poke around the markets of Port of Spain and find things that were close enough to what we’d known in Boston or learn how to cook what was totally unfamiliar. We weren’t going to have turkey, for instance, but I’d gotten a nice capon the day before, all plump and with lots of flesh on its breast even after I’d plucked all the feathers. I used breadfruit instead of sweet potatoes. I found a sausage maker, and even though the taste wasn’t like my uncle Sal’s fennel sausage back home, it was still pork and hot. I couldn’t make lasagne, like Mama always did for Thanksgiving, because I couldn’t find any cheese close enough to ricotta. But I got some cornmeal and made pastelles instead, an island dish we had one night in a local tavern and Al liked so much I got the owner’s wife to show me how she made it. I used the sausage and a bit of beef I was able to get my hands on, chopped up and browned with onions and garlic and carrots and then simmered in broth and the local spices Imelda, the old lady in the village, supplied me with. At the end of the simmer you toss in olives and raisins. With the cornmeal you make dough with water and shape into egg-shaped balls that you flatten with your hand. You put a spoonful of the meat mixture in the middle and mold the cornmeal dough around it, then wrap each little pie in banana leaves coated with oil and annatto powder. You tie up the leaves like a package and then steam the packets. Oh, when you unwrap those leaves, those pastelles are just bubbling with red juices and that spicy flavor that wafts through every kitchen in Trinidad.

There was a lot of homesickness on the base, and the only way I knew how to dispel those kinds of feelings was with food. I invited all the married couples in the compound and the single guys in Al’s platoon to Thanksgiving dinner. Each of the girls offered to bring something. Some had gotten packages from home and so we had a real feast that afternoon. We set up two long tables out in the courtyard between the cottages and covered them with bed sheets. Each family brought its own chairs and dishes, since nobody had enough to set a table for eighteen.

I think it was the first holiday any of us had spent away from our families. But you know, that day, sitting across the table from one another, we were a family.