Happy Family (3 page)

With the one pan Sol had in his Gramercy Park apartment, Cici made
risotto con funghi
and
costoletta alla Milanese
and brought it to Sol at St. Vincent's. They'd eat lunch and nuzzle in the spare room at the back of the radiology department where the nurses stored people's old X-rays. They went to the New York Philharmonic on Sunday afternoons to hear Bernstein conduct Mahler or to the Met to see the latest exhibits, even when there was standing room only. Afterward, they'd peel off their clothes and squeeze into the tub, she leaning back into him, hugging her knees to her chest so they'd both fit. There, they'd take turns reading from an Italian/English version of
The Inferno,
coconspiring in their lexicon of mixed languages and touch, laughing long after the soap-scummy water had grown cold.

In those New York City months, Cici thrived in the womb of their twosome. They went out with a few couples—acquaintances of Sol's from the hospital—but mostly kept to themselves. Cici's main obstacle to broadening her social life and knowledge of the city was her English. She'd thought she would pick it up quickly, and when that didn't happen, she felt self-conscious and frustrated. As long as she could communicate with Sol and get around, what else did she need? She could become a New Yorker without grammar. But as soon as Cici started to show, Sol decided a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan was no place to raise a family. All roads led to what their real estate agent called the “Florence of New Jersey.” Sol stretched farther than he should have and bought a turn-of-the-century Colonial house in suburban Montclair with a view of New York City. By Cici's twenty-first birthday that June, they were official New Jerseyites.

Cici's world waned as her belly waxed during the hot summer months. Montclair was quaint, with oak and poplar-lined streets, manicured gardens, and a respectable art museum. Cici could walk places, and the public library had a decent listening room and some rare opera recordings. She could go to the park and watch women tending to their children and think,
Soon, soon, I'll have a whole brood and my life will be so full I'll wish I had a quiet moment to myself.
Some of Sol's colleagues had also moved to the suburbs, and a few of the wives had gotten together to give her a baby shower. Still, Cici was isolated. She swore what happened to her mother would never happen to her—her luster wouldn't be worn down by choosing a safe, bourgeois life. She was in America, after all.

“Remember who you are, Carlottina,” her mother always said. Her girls had classical educations and perfect teeth, no matter the cost. They ate only the best cuts of veal, no white, no trace of gray, only pale pink; they knew that the best rubies were pigeon-blood red and the reasons why Verdi was superior to Wagner. Her mother made sure her girls had everything that was important to her, even when she had to stay up all night making stuffed animals out of fur to sell to department stores and spend her days giving piano lessons to children who left their seaside homes at summer's end while their family stayed on as caretakers in the winter, often without heat.

Sol is Cici's family now; she doesn't need her mother or her sisters, why is she giving in to such sentimentality? She'd written to her sister Genny on a whim, not expecting a response to the news that she was pregnant. Well, maybe she harbored the fantasy of a kind word, but she was surprised when the postman delivered a box covered in Italian stamps. She ripped through tape and wrappings like a child at Christmas and found lots of goodies—Italian
Vogue,
unfiltered Nationales, Pasta del Capitano toothpaste, risotto,
gianduiotti, stracchino
cheese that looked like a green eyeball, a blue baby blanket—but no note.

Cici sighs. “You belong in another century,” Sol liked to tease her, “one where women always wear pearls and lingerie and go around audibly sighing.” She goes to Sol's den, where there are boxes of records, picks out a bel canto recording, then heads upstairs. Cookie, a young black whippet of a thing, is descending the staircase, arms loaded with cleaning supplies. “I need some Brillo, Mz. M. After I do the kitchen, I'm going to run down the screet if that's all right with you.” Cici freezes. What's a
brillo
? A
screet
? Cici doesn't understand, doesn't want to try to understand any more of what Cook and the
e
is saying—it makes her want to cry. Cookie doesn't know what to do when, without answering, Cici walks into the baby's room and slams the door.

With shaking hands, Cici puts the record on the portable player. She grabs her white fur elephant out of the crib and sits on the rocker, hugging it to her chest and waiting for the emotion to subside. The walls of the room are painted a warm yellow and everything else is blue. She closes her eyes and listens to Maria Callas. Callas was her first. First opera she ever saw at Teatro alla Scala, first voice that could bring her to tears of joy and sorrow at the same time. Callas in
Il Pirata
—commanding, fragile, passionate. As she listens, Cici feels like Callas's voice is entering her body, reverberating in the hollow of her throat as if she could open her mouth and such beautiful music would pour out. Cici's throat doesn't feel so good. Is it Callas or heartburn? She feels clammy, and saliva starts to pool beneath her tongue.

Cookie is cleaning the kitchen, a blur in her black-and-white maid's uniform. It's two sizes too big, as she used it most of the way through her three pregnancies and didn't want the added expense of buying a new one now that her littlest one was ten months old. She's happy to have full-time work, because her husband, That No-Good Nigger, went and got himself thrown in the big house and she's got her kids and her mama to feed. That Mz. M. is a strange one. Cookie thinks she can't be much older than her, but Mz. M. seems like a child. She's got no family to look out for her and she's crying up there, listening to all that loud Italian singing. Cookie feels bad, but it's none of her business. Cookie keeps to herself because you never can tell with white folks.

Cici's about to stretch out on her bed when she notices something perched on top of the overnight bag Sol moved back upstairs. Dingy, once-white slippers that are frayed around the edges. Just as she's picking them up to inspect them further, she sinks to her knees with pain.

Cookie turns off the kitchen faucet. Is that screaming or Mz. M.'s music? When Cookie finally decides to go upstairs to investigate, Mz. M. emerges from her room looking an even paler shade of white. She's clutching her stomach. Mz. M. doesn't have to make a steering-wheel motion with her hands; Cookie knows what her boss is asking, and she nods her head. True, she doesn't have a license. But she made good and sure That Nigger taught her how to drive his rusty canoe of a car before they came and hauled his skinny ass away. “C'mon, let me help you. Cookie knows what to do.”

When Sol Matzner hangs up the phone with his new housekeeper, he's not convinced that Cici is going into labor. However, he's not at all sure that she isn't. Cookie's voice had a surprising authority. He's concerned enough to call Dr. Dubin and head out to Grand Central Station to catch the next train back to Montclair.

It starts with a spot. Cici notices a red stain in her underwear when she pees in the bathroom on the ground floor of the hospital. She had to pee so badly in the car, she didn't know which was worse, her full bladder or the contractions. By the time she gets to Dubin's office on the third floor Cici has had another couple of contractions. Cookie thinks about making eye contact with the nurse but instead she does that make-yourself-small thing she's learned to do in all-white places like this.

“My husband, he call
dottore,
” Cici says between exhales like she's blowing out a candle. The nurse isn't responding to her in that singsongy voice she uses when Solomon and Dr. Dubin were there. Cici is scared; she needs her doctor-husband, her man. Another nurse takes her into the back after the first nurse whispers something to her and hands her a chart.

Cici's out of her “below the waist” clothes, covered with a sheet in an examination room. Where is
il dottore,
they keep saying a minute but it has been many, many minutes. Solomon will be here soon, holding her hand and talking the way he talks. She just has to wait. Cici feels another cramp and then a gush of warmth between her legs. She's scared. She can't see over her belly. She scrunches up her eyes and when she opens them and sits up, she doesn't need to pull back the sheet to see what's going on. Cici is bleeding.

R
alphie is listening to his Bob Dylan LP in Terry's old room, smoking wacky tobacky, and it's making Billy Beal's eyes sting. That and the fact that he's so tired because the baby was crying all night and Moms kept coming in and out of his room to get her. Billy Beal can usually sleep on a rock in a construction site, but the baby's cry manages to get through where jackhammers can't. He hates to hear her cry and not just because it's annoying. Ralphie's moved into Terry's room now that Terry's shipped out to Asia, so Billy Beal has to bunk with the baby.

“You wanted her, you sleep with her,” Pops grumbled. Billy Beal doesn't really mind having the baby in his room, but he's hanging out with Ralphie because she's finally taking a nap and Moms and Pops are fighting downstairs. “Gotta fly, little man,” Ralphie says mid-toke, clapping Billy Beal on the back and crawling out the window. Ralphie used to climb down the tree in front of Terry's window so he could go to Asbury Park after curfew. Billy Beal hasn't a clue why he's doing it now, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon.

“For Christ's sake, if I'd wanted another kid I'd go knock up Mab—”

“It's not like she asked for twelve kids, it's men who can't keep it in their pants!”

“My ass, woman, my woolly ass. That baby's on borrowed time so don't you dare name her because we can't keep it like the goddamned stray cats.”

Billy Beal puts a pillow over his head. When the baby wakes up maybe he can take her for a walk. He doesn't know why Moms worries; he's good with her, and she's an easy baby. She shuts up when Moms shoves a bottle in her mouth. He likes to look at her while she's sucking on her bottle because she's in a whole other world. He knows Moms must have done some quick talking with the bat from the Children's Home Society—he watched them through the glass door and at one point Moms slammed her hands down on the table and the bat looked like she'd shoot up to the ceiling. He can tell Moms likes having a baby in the house. “Nothing like the smell of new life,” she'll say, sniffing the baby fresh from a bath or when she's changing her diaper. Good and bad even out inside Moms.

“With all we're blessed to have, you cheap, stingy bastard.”

“Who do you think you're talking to? Who gave you all these things? If he loses the chance of a baseball scholarship because of this, he's nothing.”

It's no use. Their words are missiles and the fallout gets him. He touches the charm he's got hidden under his T-shirt. He's never seen anything like that, with the watching eye, it's got to ward off evil spirits. He put the girl's charm on a string and kept it in his underwear drawer but recently decided to wear it for good luck. He could use some luck right about now. He touches the charm on the back and the front six times because six is his lucky number.

Pops yells at Moms, even if he never hits her. He's smashed his hand through walls and broken his share of furniture and lights, punted a cat once, but never touched Moms. Billy would like to go down there and protect her, but she'd just tell him to mind his own goddamned business. She's got a point about money; Pops is tight with a dollar, and when business is bad at the deli (which is a lot of the time), he blames Moms for having to go and have three farking kids who were eating them into the ground. One time, Pops drove away and said he was leaving for good. Billy Beal cried because he thought he'd never see his father again and he and his brothers would be like his aunt Mab's kids. When Moms couldn't shut him up, she walked him a ways down their street and pointed to a neighbor's driveway. There was the Country Squire, lights off, parked. Pops was inside, his head tilted back, mouth open. He walked in the kitchen the next morning and nobody said anything.

Billy Beal's gone from waiting for the girl to show up at the clinic to waiting for her to knock on their door. Moms told him that people from the family welfare office were still trying to track her down but hadn't been able to find any record of her or her next of kin. The information she'd written down about the father didn't check out. Moms warned him that they could only keep the baby so long, that soon she'd have to go to another foster home. “It's complicated business. There's a whole lot more to this than you can understand, Billy,” she said. Billy Beal understands more than they think. He may not change diapers, but he's doing all his chores. He even helps out with the laundry if he has to. He doesn't want the girl's baby to go to another family; the other family won't have someone like Moms.

The baby sleeps like a snow angel. Billy watches as she makes little sucking motions. She's gotten bigger, but she looks tiny in the crib Aunt Mab loaned them. Moms had put in a couple of rolled-up blankets to make it cozy, but she's got lots of room to grow. Billy Beal thinks the baby looks like Gramps did at his wake. Which makes him think maybe she's stopped breathing. He holds his hand above her mouth until he feels her breath. He'd never looked at a baby up close before. Or from afar, for that matter. It's funny because the baby likes what he likes. She gets fidgety sometimes but calms right down when he turns on the Yankees game and gives her the play-by-play along with Mel Allen. Maybe later, if the coast is clear downstairs, Moms will let them watch the Yanks/A's game on TV and he can give her the lowdown on Ralph Terry and Bill Fischer. He thinks he might be ready to try to hold the baby on his own.

There's a slam and a crash and he imagines one of Moms's porcelain dwarfs got the worst of it. And then he hears the front door bang and the sound of Pops flooding the engine of the wagon. When Billy Beal bounds down the stairs three at a time in his bare feet so as to avoid making noise, he finds Moms in the living room sweeping up what's left of Dopey or maybe Bashful. “I can do that,” he says.

“All done,” she says. She smiles but doesn't look her son in the eye. She turns her back and throws the dwarf bits into the trash can. There's something in the way she takes her time brushing out every last shard that makes Billy Beal feel ashamed.