Earthquake I.D. (20 page)

She'd been right to come. This was something she could offer even the starving creatures downstairs.

“But, I mean. This so-called radical underground,
what
is the big deal? The big hairy-scary…Father, we're not talking Al-Qaeda out at the Center. Back in New York, for instance, that memorial at Ground Zero? Hey, that place has got nothing to worry about from Naples. I mean, Muslims in Italy, you know what? Muslims tend to go for the boom towns, up north. Milan, they go for. Follow the money, right? But down here, the
clandestini
I've got, forget about it. The one time they tried anything—what? They grabbed the cook. The cook, and he never even got his hat off. He never even left the kitchen. That's the kind of hard core I've got out at the Center.”

Jay might've laughed. “NATO, I mean. Your tax dollars at work. Lately, now, you know who Kahlberg keeps asking about?”

Speaking of names. Barb pictured Lieutenant Major Kahlberg poring over a list, a schoolboy over a skin mag.

“That gypsy girl, Romy. The Lieutenant keeps asking if I've heard anything about Romy. I mean, what's he want? We all know what Romy had to do, back before Paul. It wasn't about national security, what she had to do. So what's he want, the Lieutenant Major? Especially since the girl has changed. Since Paul, she's changed. Nowadays, national security, anything like that, it's a joke for Romy. Kahlberg—she tells me to say hi to Kahlberg. Just last night she told me. She's still got friends out at the Center, people she used to run with, and last night she tells me to say hi to Kahlberg. ‘Mr. Kahlberg your NATO contact,' she tells me. Forget about it, Cesare. For that girl, that whole thing's a joke. She knows my arrangement's supposed to be a secret.”

Both men needed a long moment, enough time for Barbara to notice a bit of a commotion farther off A shout or two perhaps. Then, Jay:

“The lying, Father. The lying to Barb, it hurts me. It's—I have sinned, Father. Thanks for meeting me like this, too. I know what it's like to have to make arrangements on the fly, so thanks, really. And bless me, for I have sinned. But then there's Barbara, Cesare. Her with her I-want-a-divorce, but nothing happens. I mean, waiting around for my crazy Mom? Plus, the sex? A lot of sex, you ask me. Multiple orgasms—Father, I have to tell somebody.

“Okay, maybe it's all part of the confusion. Part of the pain, okay. But. She keeps going back to you, too, Cesare. There's that too. I mean, with whom am I speaking, when it comes to my Barbara? What's she want?”

Barb had come her closest yet to the stony closet. She was squaring herself away, preparing to step in and speak up. She and Jay needed to talk.

“Does she really want,” Jay repeated, “to grow old alone?”

Barb could see that the Jaybird had started massaging his face again. She thought that she heard him fighting tears, choking, but now there was new noise in the halls. A fresh commotion, substantial, from a group of some size.

“Bad enough,” Jay was saying, “how lonely I am already.”

A group was coming this way, uphill, with scraping footfalls and sharp but indistinct jabber. They moved in bursts, now striding along swiftly and now slowing down. Barbara backed away from her unsuspecting husband. She had the thought that she didn't want to be spotted, and she fretted about the camera over her head. A foolish thought—wasn't she planning to tell Jay exactly what she'd heard? Wasn't she going to throw it in Kahlberg's face too?

Her husband's voice had regained its strength. “What is that?” he was asking. “That out in the hall, you hear it?”

The cubicle's door, sluggish with age, creaked wide. Jay emerged looking down-ramp, his back to Barbara. When the oncoming crowd appeared at the bottom of the hallway, at first she didn't see them. Instead she studied her husband's head and shoulders, his hair improbably full despite the bald spot.

“Pop?” asked John Junior. “What are you doing here?”

“Jay?” asked Silky Kahlberg. “Jay, my man? This is a surprise.”

The voices came from opposite ends of the crowd. The liaison officer stood at the front, the farthest uphill, while Barbara's oldest was among those at the rear, almost out of sight down around the corridor's corner. The gang presented an unlikely mix, altogether. The mother needed a few moments to sort everyone out, kids and guards and Silky and, about the middle of the group, gypsy Romy in full makeup. The girl in fact looked better than the Lieutenant Major. Kahlberg's blazer hung lopsided, revealing a corner of his holster strap, and a swatch of long hair was sweat-stuck across his forehead. Barb enjoyed a surge of triumph: gotcha. She'd caught the officer with his silk down. But this exhilaration dwindled quickly when she got her first decent look at John Junior. After all, her seventeen-year-old could move faster than anyone in the crowd, and yet he was the last up the hallway. There had to be a reason—like his younger brother Paul, looking drained, hanging by his spread arms between JJ and Chris. The two older brothers weren't quite carrying Paul, he still had his feet on the ground, but Barbara's middle child was clearly bushed. He had trouble keeping his head up, now hiding and now revealing his neatly done collar button.

Beside the boys stood a group arranged in the same fashion, with the two on the outside propping up the one in the center. These were two policemen flanking a handsome African. The black wore serious shackles, wrist to waist to leg. Nevertheless he showed Barbara a smile unlike any she'd seen before, a glowing surprise of a reminder, in pink and gold and weathered ivory, that she had come to this city and castle knowing next to nothing about what she was getting into. Even his cheeks seemed to glow, and one of these was scarred with a pair of crescent moons.

“What is this?” asked Jay. “What are you guys doing here?”

Chris and JJ shared a look, across their sagging brother. It was Dora and Syl who said it first.

The days that followed, the days and the nights, had Barbara thinking often of her childhood visits to Manhattan. Bedtime had felt different over at her mother's cousins' place off Lafayette. That branch of the family lived with another world of night noise. Little Barba-bella had come across the East River before her mother ran away, but it was after the disappearance that Barb had spent the nights that now came back to her with the greatest intensity. On those nights she'd been hustled over to the old Little Italy because there'd been word of a lead, a possibility. And in the second-story front space of the cousins' brownstone, formerly her Mama's bedroom, the traffic spoke to the visiting girl. Barbara would notice the heart-of-the-borough rumble when she was left alone to slip into her nightshirt, that tender cotton, and her eyes would follow the pattern of the headlights coming through the blinds, a yellow surf across ceiling and wall. She'd pick up the noise in the morning too, before her cousin poked her head into the room and began to wheedle, like the soothing fussbudget she was, about getting dressed for Sunday Mass. During the night, in the streets towards Roosevelt Park, the machinery sometimes offered a bit that she could identify. There might be a horn going off, a truck gearing up, or the squawk and clomp of a dented door. But Barba-bella could hear that sort of thing over in Carroll Gardens. Around her mother's former home, rather, the night growled through risings and fallings that the daughter couldn't understand, and she loved the sound precisely for that, because she could never get her mind around it all, because it contained the ignition, transmission, and brake of too, too many others to know. In that motor noise beyond the narrow brick-framed windows, there resided possibilities so wild that her preteen self could no more limit them to particular car parts than she could tuck her fertile visitor's dreams into neat stories over the morning orange juice. Rather the whole overnight sequence, the horsepower coil that wheeled her into sleep and the sapphire glints left behind when she woke—all this she could only give the shape of hope itself. In the city she heard so much energy at work, at large, that she had to believe some part of it would complete its trek. Some part of that mumbling runaround always made it the entire long way out wherever it had to go and then back again; it returned to the girl, to the pillow-space beside her, chuckling in an accent and smelling faintly of cheese and olives.

The Manhattan traffic had done more for her than any other night-time soundtrack, including that of the good Bridgeport neighborhood where she'd lived as a five-star Mom. She had to admit, too, that the intervening years had hardly felt devoid of happiness. She'd even taken the same fractious reassurance in the stories at the Samaritan Center, the uproar of guilts and resentments that always somewhere revealed, improbably, and if only they could see it, fulfillment for the people involved. Also there were evenings when Barbara found the same comfort in Naples. The Vomero wasn't so bourgeois that you didn't get people driving at night. Even after the uproar at Castel dell'Ovo, and even with the chatter of the troops beneath her balcony, she had sleepy moments carried along within the infinite circumnavigations of a vast motor-driven flock, the same as had cradled her ear and spirit years ago in Lower Manhattan. Buildings and people. Downtown palaver without end, forever making the rounds.

Not that, now as they came up on three weeks in the city, the mother could forget the trouble she'd seen the first time she looked at a map. Whatever good she might get from the night traffic, in daylight Barbara was barely coping. Five days after dell'Ovo, her counterespionage, she found herself once more trailing behind the Lieutenant-Major. She'd discovered his secret, his and Jay's and yet nearly a week had gone by with her doing next to nothing about it. This morning again, she followed the NATO plan.

And her children too. The family, minus Jay and plus Kahlberg, were all getting their photograph taken on the steps of the
Museo Archeologico Nazionale
.

They were tourists again. As the group posed for the papers, to either side waited day-trippers in loose bright nylon and shelf-like waist-packs. The museum overlooked the original downtown and dominated the guidebooks. Chris had read from the
Blue Guide:
“of prime importance.” Then there was the tourist pitch,
Vedi Napoli e mouri
, see the Nazionale and die. That was the translation, right? The museum was the only reason most Americans came to town, right? Its exhibits gleaned from the entire ruin-speckled lower peninsula, greater metropolitan Siren-land. As Silky's choice for the first family excursion since dell'Ovo, it seemed a no-brainer.

Barbara went along.

This was after five days of recovery. Five days she'd hesitated, before heading to the Nazionale or anywhere else, instead shaping her time around the family's eleven-year-old question mark. These were five days without talking to the media, number one, and without fighting over what she'd overheard in the castle hallway, number two. Of course she'd told her husband, the very night, and Jay had understood what the discovery meant. As the week went on, he'd arranged to stay home more than half the time. Once or twice when he and Barb were alone together, he'd felt for the band of her underwear, but even then she'd found his expression wary. Still, what was there to fight about, once the wife made clear that her worst fears had been confirmed? What was the point of yelling and banging? What mattered was telling the kids, finding the moment.

The Jaybird had his testy moments, his fully loaded stares, but by and large he too had kept their dealings mild. As Barb and he stretched out on the bed he would agree, in a conversational rumble, that she needed to leave for America and find a good legal mediator the moment his mother arrived. Indeed the big man's self-restraint left the wife that much more committed to silence and withdrawal herself, during these days at home. To see the husband this way triggered, in her, her worst cross-the-heart zigzags yet. At her most confused, Barbara suffered the impression that the things she and Jay spoke of weren't actually going to take place, but had only been given voice as a shared penance. A two-person rosary.

These were five days of many an unsettling sensation, with the girls endlessly underfoot and Silky watching the family's every move. Sometimes the officer stopped in at the apartment and sometimes he used his cell, but either way he felt like a burden. After all, DiPio too dropped in for his checkups, AM and PM. Then there was Romy and JJ, finagling moments for their puppy love, for hugging and kissing out back by the palazzo dumpster, while the mother waited, in the doorway to the alley but made it a point not to watch, like the NATO gunman who'd also been party to arranging the tryst, averting his eyes at the alley entrance. The kids' make-out sessions went on for a couple-three days before the Lieutenant-Major heard about them, of course he heard, and of course he called to object even as he was on the way up to the Vomero to make certain the teen sweethearts wouldn't get together again—fat chance of that, Silky, but Barb had to deal with the man's call as soon as she and her oldest returned to the apartment from their latest trip down to the alley. Barbara had to deal with it all these days, plus she always had to work in an hour or so of reading aloud to Paul, no matter what else was going on. Also she chose the DVDs for the evenings. Among them were a couple in Italian, made in Hollywood but dubbed in Italian, because she'd noticed how all her boys liked to laugh at what became of the dialog. Likewise after she saw how Paul enjoyed a certain flaked ricotta pastry, nuggeted with fruit bits, she arranged for the
pasticceria
to send over two a day, and when she saw him dig into the pizza from Acunzo, the following night she had them deliver a selection of their best. The day after dell'Ovo she'd announced to the kids that no one besides their father was allowed on the street until further notice, but then that very afternoon, following a call in Dick-&-Jane English from one of the NATO boys stationed at the stoop, she'd allowed the first of JJ's conjugal visits down in the alley. And the next day there'd been the first of her renewed sessions with Cesare (and Barbara had the NATO van take her those few blocks, and she ignored the supplicant or two who always came to her, unless they reached her on the steps of her church, in which case she allowed herself a touch of their upraised Catholic doodads), and then the third day, gutting her stay-at-home rule altogether, she arranged an afternoon soccer scrimmage for JJ and Chris with the girls and Paul as cheerleaders. This was the middle child's suggestion. His demand, rather, and he wouldn't allow Mama to park him in a wheelchair, either. The family
miracolino
, it turned out, was the one for yelling and banging, so stir-crazy and over-examined by the third day that he waved his girlish hand in Mama's face and hollered he wasn't some kinda in, in,
invalid
for God's sake! These dumb he, he,
healing
episodes weren't that h-hard on him! As the boy carried on, rising to a full-blown preadolescent tantrum, he provided Barbara a contradictory reassurance; he reminded her of anger plain and simple, something she herself didn't seem able to manage these days. Later, during the scrimmage itself, Paul spent most of his time jumping up and down along the sidelines, stippling the cuffs of his black pants with snippets of new-mown grass.