Across the Table Read online

  My face turned bright red.

  “You knew? Are you angry with me?”

  “I’m here on this crazy excursion, ain’t I?”

  “Well, then. We’re going to the beach. Not Revere, where half the world knows us. I wanted us to get completely away. And Marblehead has a bus that goes directly to the water. You won’t have to walk very far.”

  “Why the beach? Why not a picnic on the Common?”

  “Because I wanted us to remember Chaguaramas.”

  At that point, I couldn’t hold my tears back. I wanted so much for him to remember.

  “I remember Chaguaramas,” he said softly. “I remember a beautiful woman in my bed, who made love to me in the rainy season, who swept away scorpions as if they were specks of dust, who kept my dinner warm and waited up for me.”

  “Oh, Al. I want that for us again.”

  “Me, too, Rose.”

  He put his arm around me and kissed me hard. And then he held me all the way to Marblehead.

  When we got to the beach we found a spot that wasn’t too far along the sand but also wasn’t on top of other people. That’s why I’d picked Wednesday, hoping it wouldn’t be too crowded, like Revere on the weekends—which is fine when you’re high school kids hanging out with your friends, but not when you’re a couple of lost and lonely adults trying to find their way back to each other.

  I spread the blanket on the sand near the shoreline. It wasn’t the azure blue of the Caribbean, but the sun caught the water at just the right angle and broke up into thousands of pinpoints of light. It was as if my brother Jimmy’s girlfriend, Marie, the Sicilian, had snagged one of her gaudy dresses and all the sequins had spilled across the ocean.

  Al pulled me down next to him, and I swear, I would’ve done anything with him at that moment. But he whispered to me.

  “I just want to hold you, Rose. Rest your head on my chest so I can breathe in your perfume.”

  We lay like that for a while, quiet, listening to one another breathe. I felt the weight of his arm draped over me and knew with certainty that’s where I wanted to be.

  When both our stomachs started growling, I stirred.

  “How about some lunch?” I murmured.

  “As long as you promise to lie down with me again after we eat.”

  I set out the dishes I’d prepared the night before: chicken salmi that had absorbed the flavors of wine vinegar and garlic and oregano overnight and that we ate with our fingers, the olive oil slick on our chins; string beans and potatoes with some chopped-up tomatoes from Uncle Annio’s garden; and the fried bananas now soaked through with rum and brown sugar. I’d even managed to put a couple of bottles of beer in the basket.

  “I used to dream of your cooking when I was sitting below deck opening up a can of C rations. Some of the guys in my unit swooned about their girls’ hips or legs, the way they danced or kissed. But none of them could brag about the way their girls cooked, because you always had them beat.”

  “You talked about my food and not my looks? What, is that what you remembered about me?” I slapped him playfully, but hard, on the arm.

  He laughed. “I kept those memories to myself. I didn’t want to share with anybody else what you looked like coming out of the shower or stretched out next to me in bed. I could close my eyes and picture you asleep. Did you know I used to just watch you sleeping? Especially early in the morning when I left for work. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at your face. I couldn’t believe someone as beautiful as you was my wife. I still don’t.”

  I choked up a little at that. For a guy who’d been moping on the couch for two months without showing much interest in married life, he’d been holding back a lot.

  “I’m glad you made us get away, Rose. The sun, the water. It’s a little like old times.”

  “Let’s go for a swim.” I pulled at his hand. At first, he resisted. I don’t think he wanted me or anyone else to see his scarred body. But it really was pretty deserted where we were. I made him hold a towel around me so I could change into my swimsuit, a two-piece from Port of Spain.

  “I remember that suit. You still fill it out in all the right places.”

  He patted my backside. A good sign, I thought. I turned around and began to unbutton his shirt. He stopped my hand and shook his head.

  “You go, and I’ll admire you from the shore.”

  “I don’t want to swim alone. Besides, it’s just us on this part of the beach. I bet your doc would tell you swimming’s great exercise. And if you swim, we don’t have to lie about getting physical therapy today.”

  Reluctantly he agreed. But only if I’d glance away while he undressed and also walked ahead of him into the water.

  “I don’t care what your body looks like, Al. I just want to feel it close to mine.”

  But I plunged into the water and waited with my back to him until I felt his arms around me. I pressed myself against him and then wriggled free.

  “Come on, swim with me.”

  I dived down under the water and took off. I hadn’t been able to swim like this since we’d left Trinidad. The few times I’d taken Al Jr. to Revere Beach, I’d waded in the shallows while he splashed around.

  I moved through the water, propelling myself with strong kicks and loving the sensation of slipping through the waves. I looked over my shoulder to see if Al was having as much fun as I was. He was behind me, stroking slowly and carefully, as if he was testing how far he could push himself before he started hurting. But his face was serene, not tight with pain or with the color drained out of him like he got when he hoisted himself up the stairs on his crutches. I think he was surprised.

  I turned onto my back and floated, waiting for him to catch up.

  When he swam up next to me, I threw my arms over his shoulders and wrapped my legs around him. Out of the water he could never have held me like this. But he cradled me and pulled me close, kissing me as the water lapped around us.

  It’s a good thing my face was wet and salty already, because it hid the tears.

  We swam for about fifteen more minutes, then stretched out to dry on the blanket. Al put on his undershirt when we got out of the water. I turned away so he wasn’t embarrassed. But I could see what six months in a body cast had done to the muscles in his chest. I bit my tongue to keep from saying anything, from letting him hear any pity in my voice.

  We slept for a little while, relaxed from the swim and the sun in ways that the daily grind didn’t allow us. When I felt him stirring, I chose my moment.

  “Al?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Thank you for coming with me today.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

  “Me, neither. It’s what I dreamed we’d have, all through the time you were away. It’s what I dream we’ll always have. I’ve got another dream, Al. A new one. You want to hear about it?”

  He turned his body to me, so that we were facing each other.

  “Fire away.”

  I told him about the restaurant for sale, the apartment above it. What I thought we could do with the place. A home of our own. Our own business. I started to get excited, describing the potential I saw on that street.

  “Whoa, Rose.” He raised his hand to stop my babbling. “How are we going to pay for this?”

  He was well aware that I knew to the penny how much money we had in the bank and coming in every month from my paycheck and his navy pension. His question wasn’t a challenging or incredulous one. I felt like he believed in me, believed that what I was describing wasn’t a pipe dream but was really within our reach.

  I sat up, enumerating on my fingers each of the sources I’d thought of. He listened to me.

  “Have you talked to your folks yet, or the bank?”

  “No, of course not! Not until I’d talked to you. I want this to be our future. But only if you want it, too.”

  “Aw, Rose. What do I know about running a restaurant? My ma did the cooking. All
I know is how to hammer a nail and level a two-by-four. And now I can’t even do that.”

  He started to slip back into his shell and I had to grab him before all the goodness from this day in the sun got wiped out by the darkness of his self-pity.

  “Al Dante! I’ve never known you to give up, so don’t go giving up on yourself right now. There was a time in your life when you didn’t know what a two-by-four was, and you learned. You’re a smart guy and a brave guy. And I can’t believe you’d turn away from something just because you didn’t know how to do it. If you have no interest in running a restaurant, or think it’s a bad decision, then I’ll listen to you. But if you’re going to say no to every idea I present you with because you feel like you can’t do it, then you’re not the Al I love!”

  “I need to take care of my family. I don’t want you to feel you have to do it all.”

  “That’s why I got excited when I saw the sign in Nardone’s window. I thought we could do it together. And live right above the shop, so I wouldn’t have to go off to work every day and be away from you and Al Jr. I want us to have a chance, Al. Whether it’s the restaurant or something else.”

  “You really didn’t talk to anyone else about this?”

  “No. And I won’t until you give me the go-ahead. This is between you and me, Al. I know other girls bring their families into the middle of things, pit themselves against their husbands sometimes. But you and I had a different start than other couples because of Chaguaramas. We only had each other. And all the time you were away and I was living alone with my folks, I never once forgot that I was your wife first. I’m still your wife first, a daughter second. I believe in you, Al. I believe in us—that we have a future together. We’re luckier than most. I know you look at yourself and don’t see that yet. But you will. Believe in us, Al.”

  I hadn’t intended to get so worked up. I’d meant to be rational and businesslike, to show Al what good sense it made for us to buy the restaurant. Instead, I was becoming dramatic. I had his hands in mine and held them tight, as if to transfer to him all the faith I had that we would make it.

  Maybe it was the difference between men and women, or maybe it was the difference between being in the middle of battle and being on the homefront. I’d had fears, but bombs weren’t exploding next to my bed; nobody’d pointed a gun at my head or at my baby. If that’s what it was, we were always going to have that gulf between us—our separate experience of the past three years. And I’d have to be the one who fought for us to have faith in ourselves and our future.

  That’s what I grasped that afternoon on the beach, and why I poured my heart and soul into convincing Al that we had to have the courage to take the next step in our lives—even if that step seemed to be off the side of a cliff. I needed to let him know that I was holding the release cord on the parachute and I wouldn’t let us fall.

  “You really want this, don’t you, Rose?”

  “Yeah, I do. But not for me. For us—you, me and Al Jr.”

  “Then I’m okay with it.”

  It was all I could ask for right then—that he was okay with the idea. I understood he was still too scared and too tired to imagine himself strong enough to take on anything more than getting himself up the stairs on his own. But I didn’t ever want him to think he wasn’t strong enough to take care of his family.

  I threw my arms around him. “Oh, thank you, Al!”

  I kissed him hard and he pulled me close.

  That night, Al came to my bed after my parents had gone to sleep.

  “I need to hold you. I can’t give you anything else right now. But lying next to you on the beach I realized how much I miss having you in my arms.”

  I lifted the sheet in welcome and he slid his sunburned body next to mine. I nestled my behind against his belly; he wrapped his arms around me and we settled into the best night’s sleep either of us had had in years.

  Paradiso

  A MONTH LATER, the Japanese surrendered. The war was over. And the Dante and Vitale families bought a restaurant.

  After Al had agreed to my idea on the beach at Marblehead, we sat down with my parents and asked them to put money into the restaurant. And as I’d expected, they said yes—not only to the money, but to helping us out, Papa with the renovations, Mama in the kitchen.

  It took us three months to clean the place up. No wonder Anthony Nardone’s brothers wanted nothing to do with it. It was a pigsty. One of the first things I did was get a cat to take care of the rats.

  On nights and weekends I scrubbed and bleached and scoured. Al started tinkering with the equipment, and even though his right arm was too damaged to wield heavy tools, he found he could still do the delicate work with small parts that took a sharp eye and a slow, careful hand. He could’ve been a surgeon, I told him. Thanks to Al, we didn’t have to scrap the stove or the refrigerator.

  We hoisted a new sign over the windows just before Thanksgiving. Paradiso. It was red and black with gold leaf around the edges of the letters. Everybody got dressed up and we took a photo out front—Al and me, Al Jr., my parents and Al’s parents. Then we went inside and toasted with a bottle of Papa’s Chianti.

  We held Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant that year, shortly before we opened to the public. Everybody came. My brothers Carmine and Jimmy had made it back safe from Italy. My sister Bella traveled from Albany with her husband and three kids. My brother Sal, the butcher, who lived up the street, my sister Lillian, who’d moved out to the country when her husband got a job at the General Radio factory, my sister Ida, the nurse, who worked at Mass General, Al’s folks, his brothers and their wives—they all trooped down to Salem Street. The first snow had fallen and everyone arrived with red cheeks and cold feet, hungry and looking for warmth and a good meal.

  We didn’t disappoint. We’d pushed all the tables together to fit the thirty of us. While the three turkeys roasted, Mama and I spent the morning arranging platters of antipasto with her pickled eggplant, olives, fennel, roasted red peppers, vinegar peppers, marinated mushrooms, tuna, provolone, salami, prosciutto and soprasatto. After the antipasto, we served escarole soup with little meatballs, then Mama’s handmade manicotti and, finally, the turkey along with candied yams and broccoli and cauliflower that we’d battered and fried the way Mama did zucchini flowers in the summer. For dessert, Mama made her sweet ricotta pie and I, of course, baked the apple pies.

  We ate for four hours. To have everyone together, especially the boys home from the war, was a gift. But not everyone was happy for us about the restaurant. I put it down to jealousy and lack of imagination. I felt resentment from my brother Sal’s wife, who until then had been able to feel like the queen of the manor because her husband owned his own business.

  My brother Jimmy worried that Mama and Papa were in over their heads financially. Because I was the baby of the family, he thought my parents were spoiling me, doing for me what the others had to do for themselves.

  So there was this undercurrent of tension at dinner. I saw the eyes of appraisal as people came into the dining room. It wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t cheap-looking, either. We had curtains on the windows that I’d sewn and cloth tablecloths and napkins. The linoleum on the floor had been stripped and waxed and buffed, so it looked like new.

  I knew the value of appearances. You had to look like a winner for people to believe you were a winner. But some of my family thought I was putting on airs, trying to be better than they were.

  And they were right. I did want to do better. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a back bedroom overlooking the alley. I wanted my son and the rest of my children, God willing, to have more than we had growing up in the Depression.

  Don’t get me wrong. Most of them at the table that day wished us well.

  “Salute,” they said. “Buona fortuna!”

  But those with small minds and jealous hearts only knew how to be naysayers, full of doom and gloom.

  “What do any of you know about running a r
estaurant?” they sniffed.

  “Do you know how many restaurants go under in the first year?”

  “How much in hock are you—and Mama and Papa—for this place?”

  At one point, I had to get up from the table and go into the kitchen to keep from shooting my mouth off and throwing the whole family into turmoil.

  Al followed and found me furiously slicing bread, tears ruining my makeup.

  “Hey, babe,” he said quietly, putting his arms around me. “I miss you out there.”

  “They make me so mad! I was afraid I’d say something I’d regret and upset Mama.”

  “They can all go to hell. Especially after we show them what a success this place will be. Just ignore them. Let them stuff their bellies with your delicious food and then go home, mad that they didn’t think of it themselves.”

  He kissed me on the neck. I wiped my face and brought the basket of bread to the table with my head held high.

  I worked at the bank another whole year while we got on our feet with Paradiso. Al and I moved with Al Jr. into the space directly above the restaurant; we’d kept the tenants in the other two apartments—the Boscos, who had no children, in the smaller one on the top floor, and the Agostinos, who’d been in America about three years, right below them. Both families were good people who paid the rent on time and were happy with the change in landlords.

  Paradiso survived that first year with all of us working hard. When I came home at three o’clock, I changed into my cooking clothes and headed downstairs to help Mama and Al. We served pizza and sandwiches—meatball, sausage and peppers, cold cuts—for lunch. At five o’clock we started serving dinner. We kept Milly on as a waitress, and when it got busy, I waited tables, as well. Al had been cautious in the kitchen when we first opened, deferring to Mama and doing whatever she instructed him to do, which wasn’t much beyond adding ingredients to pots she’d already started. But when our volume began building, he saw for himself that he needed to take on more. He conquered pizza, mastered a kneading technique that only required one hand, and worked out a smooth assembly process that got the pies in the oven in record time. From there, he started taking on other dishes with gusto, watching Mama downstairs at Paradiso or me on Sundays in the kitchen upstairs. He’d slip his arms around my waist and, in between nuzzling my neck, watch and sniff as the garlic and basil hit the olive oil in the pan.