Across the Table Read online

  Maybe that was what Chaguaramas changed about me. I didn’t have those routines to fall into. Sometimes on my days off, especially toward the end when Al was working nonstop to finish the air base, I climbed by myself to the top of the plateau past the housing compound. From there I could see the Caribbean and forget myself in the endless vista of sea and sky. Close in, of course, were the battleships and tenders, an ominous reminder that we were at war. The harbor was as busy and congested as Boston. But if I looked up and off to the right, beyond the gray metal hulls and camouflage netting that disguised the glint of guns, I saw only open sea, and it opened up my heart.

  I wished the rest of the world could feel this, instead of bombing cities.

  There were other things I experienced at Chaguaramas. Imelda and her family, for instance. Her husband, Buddy, who played drums at a club in Port of Spain and delivered ice in his wooden wagon. Their daughters Jane and Margaret and their children, who ran around Imelda’s garden and climbed into her ample lap.

  I’d never been around black people before, had never seen them with their families. The first time Imelda offered me a cup of coffee, I have to admit I hesitated. A lot of the merchants in Port of Spain treated the navy people like invaders, intruders. But Imelda, up in her village—after her surprise at my sudden appearance the day I went looking for fresh vegetables—took an interest in me. Maybe I needed some mothering in those early months away from my family and she understood that. She didn’t pressure me that first time, when she offered and I made an excuse not to stay and sit with her. But then I felt foolish. What was I afraid of? That someone would see and think I was doing something wrong? I usually don’t care what other people think. So the next time she asked, I said yes.

  Imelda’s coffee was strong and sweet, like Mama’s. Black coffee—espresso—was what Mama made for Papa after dinner. One demitasse with a shot of anisette and a twist of lemon peel is how he liked it. But in the afternoons, after she’d finished the laundry, the cleaning and the marketing and before she started dinner, Mama sat with her cup of “American coffee.” She learned how to use the grinder at the A&P and brought home a bag that took her a month to use up. Sometimes she sat with her sister and visited. But more often than not, she enjoyed her coffee alone, listening to the radio.

  At Imelda’s table I felt like I was in my mother’s kitchen. If I’d told anyone back home that, they would’ve thought I was crazy. Even the girls in the compound never went to the village.

  “Rose, honey,” Imelda would ask, “have you written to your mama lately? If Margaret or Jane and my grandbabies were so far away from me I don’t think I could stand it.” She fanned herself with an old catalog while she poured us both a cup.

  Mama never learned to read, but I wrote her a letter every week. My brother Jimmy read them to her. She sent me photographs each month holding up one of my letters.

  Her not being able to read made me realize how cut off she must’ve been from her own family when she left Italy. At least I knew we weren’t going to be in Trinidad forever. But I wondered if I could’ve done what she did—leave everything and build a new life from nothing.

  Motherhood

  ALBERT DANTE, JR., was born on Thanksgiving Day at Boston Lying-In Hospital. It was Patsy, my maid of honor, who got me there, calling a taxi when my water broke and pain ripped through me. It hadn’t been an easy pregnancy. I threw up for five months; I gained forty pounds and spent the last six weeks propped up at night with pillows because the heartburn was so bad. But I wrote none of that to Al. I wrote instead about the first time I felt the baby move, a flutter that felt like he was pushing off the inside of my belly as if it were the end of a swimming pool. I wrote about the shower the girls at the office gave me, the bassinet I’d found at Jordan Marsh that just fit in my room, the blanket Al’s mother had crocheted. I didn’t write about how terrified I was to give birth. Al had plenty of his own to be terrified about.

  He was on a ship in the Pacific carrying marines. Like me, I think Al was holding back on describing the daily terrors of his life. I saw enough in the newsreels, read enough in the Herald, to know he was keeping the worst from me. And he was never one who liked to write a lot, so for him to fill one of those thin blue sheets every week with any news at all was a big deal.

  He was bursting, of course, when I wrote him about my pregnancy, which I sat down and did minutes after I’d read the results of the pregnancy test. He worried that he wouldn’t be with me when my time came. Honestly, I wrote him back, what man was when his wife was giving birth? He could pace the deck of his destroyer just as well as he could pace the waiting room of the maternity ward. He made me promise to send a telegram as soon as the baby was born.

  I wasn’t the only woman to have a baby alone while her husband was at war. But that doesn’t help you much, I discovered, when you’re scared and in pain and then in so much joy that no one else can share with you except your baby’s father. I wanted Al with me so badly that first moment when the nurse put our son in my arms. I wanted to see Al’s face light up; I wanted to watch him stroke the fine swirl of hair on his baby’s head and kiss his cheek.

  I wanted him to take us both in his arms.

  Instead, I asked Patsy to take a photograph. She fixed my hair and made me put on some rouge and lipstick, and then presented me with a box wrapped in lilac paper.

  “For the new mother. A little something to remind you that you’re still a woman.”

  I opened it while she held the baby. Inside, buried in layers of tissue paper, was a peach-colored peignoir with a matching quilted silk jacket.

  “You put this on, then we take the picture for Al. What better for a guy at war than a photo of his son in the arms of a woman worthy of being a pinup?”

  So I changed and sat in the chair by the window, wrapped Al Jr. in the crocheted blanket from his grandmother and beamed at the camera.

  Later, when the nurse took Al Jr. back to the nursery, my parents arrived with Thanksgiving dinner. With Carmine and Jimmy overseas, my sisters and my brother Sal spending the holiday with their in-laws, and Cookie and her babies with her parents, Mama needed someone to feed, and I was it.

  She made a turkey that she stuffed like a veal roast, with parsley, bread crumbs, sausage and hard-boiled eggs. She even put some alice—anchovies—in the stuffing, which she knew I liked but weren’t a favorite with anyone else in the family. She had manicotti in her basket, as well, filled with her own ricotta. And she brought me a stuffed artichoke, overflowing with garlic and Parmigiano.

  I leaned back and let her slice the meat and pile my plate with more than enough food. Papa, dressed in his Sunday suit, walked down the hall to peer at his new grandson and returned smiling.

  “He looks like me. He’s gonna be a good boy.”

  “Hah!” said Mama and handed him a plate of food.

  It wasn’t Al sitting there with me. God only knew when he’d see his son. But after I’d eaten the meal my mother had prepared for me, I was able to sleep. I wasn’t alone.

  When Al Jr. was four months old, my boss at Shawmut called. My replacement hadn’t worked out; they wanted me back, if I was willing. With so many men called up in the war, the government was encouraging women, even mothers, to go to work. Because Mama offered to take care of Al Jr., I went back.

  Mama had done piecework at home when we were kids. So the idea of a mother earning money, working at something outside the family, wasn’t an issue for me. But I hadn’t thought about what I’d do. I was so intent on giving birth, getting through what scared me the most, that anything afterward was still a dream. All during my pregnancy I prayed that the war would be over by the time the baby came, because I couldn’t imagine being a family, being a mother, without Al.

  But the war didn’t end, and I brought Al Jr. home to the back bedroom in my parents’ apartment. I sat on the edge of the bed and held him, and the fear I’d overcome by giving birth was replaced by the fear of having to be both mother and father
to him. Once I had him in my arms, heard his cry, felt his heartbeat, I understood what I’d seen in Cookie’s eyes the night before Carmine left. Because she was already a mother, she knew. The fierce need to protect our children, keep them safe from harm. It was such a monumental task. I asked myself how I was going to do it without Al, and knew I had to find a way.

  The job—being able to provide for us—was part of how I survived the fear. I aired out my suits from the mothballs I’d stored them in, put on my stockings and heels and went back to work.

  With so many men gone, there was too much for my boss to handle, and he turned to me. He gave me small jobs at first, but gradually he realized he could trust me with more. I took to numbers quickly. I liked the certainty; I liked the satisfaction of balancing debits and credits. I liked figuring out the worth of something and judging whether someone asking for a loan had the capacity to pay it back. Not just the dollars and cents, but the honor to make good on a promise.

  I couldn’t define the quality I was looking for when applicants came into the office. Maybe I was simply measuring them against Al, whom I knew to be true to his word, a man who’d face a challenge and meet it, despite the obstacles.

  In the afternoons, when I got back from the bank, I changed into my housedress and fed Al Jr. his supper, stacked blocks with him, nuzzled and tickled him until he giggled and kicked his chubby legs. When I put him to bed, we kissed the photo of Al I kept on the dresser.

  “Kiss Daddy good-night, sweetheart,” I told him, long before he knew what a daddy was.

  After he was asleep, I described everything he did in letters to Al. “Al Jr. took his first step today. Your mother held out a biscott’ and he let go of the chair he was clutching and raced across the room to grab it.” “He said ‘Da-Da’ tonight and pointed to your picture!” “He’s out of diapers!” “He climbed the jungle gym in the park on Prince Street for the first time.”

  It never occurred to me that Al Jr. would be a little boy before he met his father.

  I was helping Mama cook for Thanksgiving. We had celebrated Al Jr.’s second birthday on Sunday with his cousins, and Al had managed to send him a birthday card that arrived in time. Al was in the South Pacific. That was all I knew. The newsreels were full of images of planes dropping bombs and exploding battleships. All I could do was pray that one of them wasn’t his.

  I was up to my elbows in pastry dough for the pies. I’d convinced Mama that we should serve an American apple pie in addition to the sweet ricotta pie with ten eggs and grated orange peel she always made for the holidays—not only Thanksgiving, but Christmas and Easter, as well. I wanted Al Jr. to grow up an American. He spent the week with grandparents who only spoke Italian to him. But his father was an American serviceman, fighting for his country. The least we could do was teach Al Jr. to eat apple pie, sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.

  “You spend too much time with those Americans at the bank. What’s wrong with what I cook for the holidays?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, Mama. It’s delicious. But we’re Americans, too! It’s not such a bad thing. You and Papa chose to come here.”

  “I don’t know how to make apple pie and I’m too old to learn. If you want your son to have apple pie, then you make it.”

  Which is why I was kneading dough when the doorbell rang. I wiped my hands on my apron and answered.

  “Mrs. Dante?” The Western Union delivery boy stood in the doorway, a thin yellow envelope in one hand, a pen and receipt in the other. I blindly signed the form and took the envelope, my hand trembling and a silent voice screaming inside my head, No! No! No!

  I sat down at the kitchen table and stared at the envelope, unable to move. Al Jr., who’d been playing with a toy truck on the floor, stopped and came up to me, tugging on my sleeve.

  “Mommy, Mommy, what’s that?”

  Mama came in carrying a stack of shirts to iron.

  “Rosa, who was at the door?” Then she saw the envelope, made the sign of the cross and kissed the crucifix that always hung around her neck.

  “What does it say? Which one? Who?” she screamed at me.

  I hadn’t even thought of my brothers, God forgive me. But the envelope was addressed to me, not my parents. It could only be Al. But I couldn’t answer. I was frozen.

  Frantic, she grabbed the envelope and tore it open. She thrust it in front of my face.

  “Read it to me!”

  I didn’t want to. Couldn’t.

  “Rosa, read it to me now. We have to know.”

  She spoke with the firmness of voice I’d learned to use with Al Jr., and I listened.

  “‘Mrs. Dante—We regret to inform you that your husband, Petty Officer Albert Fiore Dante, has been wounded in action in the Philippine Sea. The extent of his injuries is serious and he is awaiting transport to a hospital ship.’

  “Oh, my God, he’s alive! He’s coming home.” And I collapsed in tears in my mother’s arms.

  Reunion

  TWO MONTHS LATER, in January 1945, Al arrived at the navy hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. I got a few days off from the bank and took the train from South Station to Washington. It had been nearly three years since I’d seen him. When I walked into the ward on that gray day in January I scanned the line of beds looking for my husband and did not recognize him until the nurse pointed him out.

  The tanned, robust man who’d left in the spring of 1942 had been replaced by a gaunt, pale shadow. In the intervening months since the telegram arrived, I’d learned that his back, leg and arm had been broken by the impact of an explosion. His body was riddled with shrapnel. Although many of the external scars had healed, he was still in a body cast and faced months of rehabilitation. The navy had informed me that his Seabee career was over. More than likely, he’d never work in construction again.

  But he was alive, I repeated to myself. He was alive.

  I moved to his bedside. I’d taken the time, when I got to Union Station, to change and put on some makeup. I was wearing his favorite perfume, and as I bent toward him I saw the flicker of recognition at my scent.

  “Hey, baby,” I murmured and kissed him on the lips.

  “Hey, baby,” he replied and, with his good arm, pulled me as close as I could get against his rigid cast. I exhaled. We were going to make it.

  It would be another month before Al was transferred to the VA hospital in Boston. I couldn’t stay with him in Bethesda—because of Al Jr., because of my job—but that first week. I barely left his side.

  I fed him. I gave him ice chips to suck on and wiped his forehead when he got the sweats. I bathed the parts of his body not covered in plaster.

  At first, he didn’t want me to. Out of shame.

  “C’mon, Al. I’ve touched every inch of your body. You think there’s something I haven’t seen? What did you do, get a tattoo with some other woman’s name on it?”

  I teased him.

  “It’s not the same,” he protested. “I’m not the same.”

  “Neither am I. I wasn’t a mother before you left. I have a few scars, too.”

  But it was more than our bodies, I knew, that we were thinking about. We weren’t kids anymore. The war had seen to that. And we were strangers to each other. I’d kept so much from him in my letters, not wanting to trouble him with what he could do nothing about. He didn’t know about the nights I’d spent walking the floor with Al Jr. when he had the croup and I was afraid it would turn into pneumonia. Or the fight I had with Mama about how to treat it—she with her witches’ remedies and me wanting to take him to the doctor. He didn’t know that I’d looked for an apartment during my lunch hour after that fight, ready to pack my bags and take my baby. Maybe I’d gotten too used to being on my own in Trinidad. Too much of me had been shaped into something Mama would never understand. There were nights I’d blamed Al for how I felt. If he’d been with me, not fighting the war, we’d have been a normal family with a place of our own. I never talked about this to anyone. I was so ashamed—how unpat
riotic, when so many families were sacrificing even more.

  I don’t know how many times over the past three years I’d imagined Al’s homecoming and what it would mean for us. He’d been gone longer than we’d been together and, in the grim, cold winters of Boston, with a sick baby and empty bed, I began to forget who he was. Our life together at Chaguaramas seemed like a fairy tale, a story that had happened to someone else, not Al and me. I wondered if we could ever be those two people again. I could only guess at the secrets Al kept from me during those years apart. Horror. Loneliness. Fear.

  Don’t get me wrong. Having him back, even broken as he was, was all I wanted. But I was scared. And I knew he was, too. It felt as though we’d have to start all over again, but this time with a child who didn’t know his father, and parents—both his and mine—watching every move, listening to every word.

  I wanted to scream.

  Instead, I got back on the train to Boston at the end of the week, pulled a scrap of paper out of my purse and made a list of every positive aspect of our situation. There were so many women who didn’t have half of what I had—no husbands, strangers or otherwise, to welcome back into their beds, no fathers to introduce to their children. They wouldn’t even have graves to visit.

  “Be grateful,” I told myself. “God gave us a second chance.”

  As the train pulled into South Station late that night I’d calmed down. Al was in no condition to have me go all mopey. He needed me to be stronger now than all the years he’d been away. There’d be time for me to lean on him later.

  Al spent two more months in the hospital, but once he was back in Boston, I could visit him every weekend and his mother learned how to take the trolley out to Jamaica Plain on Wednesdays so she could bring him food. We decided to wait until he was out of his cast before I brought Al Jr. to the hospital. It was the end of March by then and Al was able to sit up in a wheelchair. He was in the hospital solarium when we arrived. He’d shaved and gotten a haircut for the occasion and had even put on some weight since he’d been taken to Bethesda. I convinced myself that he looked close enough to the photograph Al Jr. knew as “Daddy” that he wouldn’t be a total stranger to his son.