Rococo (8 page)

Mary Kate loops her red hair into a bun on the nape of her neck. “I really like Italian men. It’s the way you look at a woman.”

I think of my father, who used to look at my mother’s face as though it was a beanbag. “What do you mean?”

“It’s awe,” she says earnestly as she puts on her blouse and buttons it up. “You look at women like we know something.” She stands without a shred of modesty or shame and looks for her skirt. Her pink skin, saturated in gold streetlight, looks like polished marble.

I don’t know what to say, so I simply smile and step back into my pants.

“But you know what I really, really like about you in particular, Bartolomeo?” She takes my hand. “You don’t ruin it with a lot of talk.”

We return the fringe to the display wall, she turns out the lights, and we walk arm in arm down the winding staircase, which gives me a slight case of vertigo. I hold on to her on one side and the rope railing on the other. “Wait. I have to give you something.” What an odd thing for a girl to say after sex. Mary Kate disappears into the back showroom, leaving me in the foyer. She returns quickly with a book.

“Here.” She gives me the book
An Outline of European Architecture
by Nikolaus Pevsner. “This will give you lots of ideas for your church.”

“Thank you.” I kiss her and tuck the book under my arm.

Once outside, I hail a cab, help Mary Kate into the backseat, and stuff some money into the driver’s hand, instructing him to wait until she is safely inside her building in Sunnyside, Queens. She rolls down the window and leans out. The wisps of her red hair flutter against the yellow taxi like feathers.

“The bullion you liked,” she says.

“Yes?”

“It’s number 1217.” She smiles sweetly.

The taxi drives away, its red brake lights disappearing as it moves toward the East River Drive. I button my coat against the chill of the night air. I miss Mary Kate for a moment. I miss her creamy skin that smells like vanilla saltwater taffy. But the pang of sadness quickly fades as I walk up Third Avenue. Let’s face it, the best part of sex is when it’s over. I like to make love, say good-bye, and then be alone to reflect. Of course I always say a prayer that I won’t rot in hell for having done the deed in the first place. Guilt after sex is the espresso after dessert.

I don’t know what kind of Catholic Mary Kate is, but somehow she avoided the modesty and shame pill the rest of us took. Good for her. Perhaps Mary Kate has the right idea—making love is absolutely ordinary and as delicious as a bowl of ice cream. Why can’t I let it be that? Why can’t I learn from a bright girl with legs so strong she could crack walnuts between her knees? Something more to think about on the drive home, but first I need a nightcap.

I walk over to Gino’s, a decorator hangout near Bloomingdale’s, for one of their Manhattans, heavy on the sweet vermouth, just the way I like them. I feel a twinge in my left calf, similar to the tug one feels after riding a horse. I slip onto a bar stool and place my order, propping my foot on the brass rail to relax my leg. I open Pevsner’s book, falling into the glorious illustrations of baroque architecture.

“Somebody has a charley horse,” a voice says from behind me.

“Too much walking,” I lie.

“If you say so.”

I turn to this nosy yet perceptive stranger. How exotic she is, and how familiar she looks! Her jet-black hair reaches to her waist like the lushest silk fringe. She wears a midnight-blue sari wrapped close to her trim waist, bound by intersecting streamers (!) of gold lamé. Her shoes are flat gold sandals, the same color as her enormous hoop earrings and bangle bracelets, which take up most of her forearms. While she is formidably bold in her fashion choices, she has a charm to her that is completely accessible.

“Do I know you?” she asks.

“I’m Bartolomeo di Crespi.”

“Don’t know the name. Are you ASID?”

“Yep. How could you tell?”

“Eydie Von Gunne.” The beautiful woman extends her hand. I take it, admiring her firm grip. Then she does a delightful thing. She shakes her wrist so the many gold bangles fall over her hand like gold lassos. Her arms are long and thin and remind me of one of those fertility goddesses with many arms you see in Tibetan art. “Your suit is a dead giveaway. Charcoal-gray with magenta pinstripe. Only a decorator would go for such a daring choice. What are you working on?”

“A church.” Why am I telling her this? I don’t even have the job yet; why am I trying to impress her?

Eydie smiles. “Europe or America?”

“New Jersey.”

“Gothic, Romanesque, or modern?”

“Gothic.”

“My specialty is churches. I know them like the back of my hand.”

“You don’t look like a cloistered nun.”

“Nope, I never took the veil. Unless it was in a harem, of course.” She snaps open her evening bag, a velvet clutch covered in peacock feathers, and hands me her card:

E
YDIE
V
ON
G
UNNE
—A
RCHITECT
& H
ISTORIAN

17 Park Avenue

555-1127

“If you ever want to talk church, give me a call.”

“I’ll do it,” I promise her.

“Any guy who reads Pevsner at a bar is my kind of guy.” She smiles.

“You know what I love the most about New York City?”

“Let me guess. The lake at Central Park, the grand staircase at the Met, or the Milbank Mansion on West Tenth Street?”

I stop her. “No, although that’s a fantastic list.”

“What, then?” She seems truly interested in my answer.

“I love that I’m sitting here alone reading a book and you said hello.”

She shrugs. “I like that suit.”

A tall, chiseled Cary Grant type with white hair comes up to the bar and puts his arm around her. “Ready, hon?” he says in her ear.

“Uh-huh.” She tilts her head and nuzzles his cheek. The maître d’ pulls Mr. Chiseled away for a moment, so I am not formally introduced.

“That fellow is Hollywood handsome,” I tell her.

“Oh, he knows it.” She smiles and turns her head in profile to look at him.

Now I realize why Eydie looks so familiar. Against the forest-green walls, her head and neck are outlined like a tintype. That’s it! She has my old nose! Except on her, with her height, long face, and heavy-lidded Egyptian eyes, it works. “Nice to meet you, Bartolomeo.”

“Good night, Eydie.”

As her companion holds the door open for her, Eydie steps out into the night like a blue bird sailing up into a dark sky. For a second, I want to follow her. She took one look at me and seemed to know who I was. How ridiculous! I just met the woman! What is it with me? Whenever I’m with a woman, I want to escape, and once she’s gone, I miss the trap.

CHAPTER THREE

The Ottoman Empire

I take the steps two at a time as I climb to the choir loft for Sunday Mass. My rendezvous with Mary Kate has turned out to be a tonic. I have a pep in my step that wasn’t there last week. My postcoital regret has turned to a warm glow, almost like a shot of Fernet Branca after a rare steak. My chance meeting with Eydie Von Gunne has also given me a boost. I keep looking at her business card as though it’s a diamond. I’m going to sing my lungs out in Mass this morning.

I’m also feeling good because I’ve decided to have a serious sit-down with Capri and end our betrothal charade. After my night of love in Scalamandré, I said two rosaries begging the Blessed Lady for forgiveness—not for the act but for lying about being unencumbered. The phrase “free bird” keeps ringing in my ears like a fire alarm. I can’t be part of this ongoing deception anymore. Capri is a wonderful girl, and she deserves to find happiness on her own. After all, if she was attracted to me, we would have had a little more contact than the one time she grazed my thigh with her left breast when I was on a stepladder hanging a valance in the Mandelbaum den in 1968.

Every Sunday, Capri sits in the first row of the choir loft wearing her prescription sunglasses, resting her chin on the railing, watching the action below like she’s spending the afternoon at Brandywine Raceway betting on the horses. As I observe her from the back row of the choir loft, I realize that we’ve never broken up because there was never a reason to. She never pushed me to marry, and I never pushed back. Our relationship was like a brown overcoat. It works with everything, so why change it?

Aurelia is at the organ, going over the choir selections with Zetta. I slip into the seat next to Capri.

“How are you?” Capri looks at me and smiles. She is not even slightly suspicious that I went to New York and made love with Mary Kate Fitzsimmons, which is another reason to break up. “You’re not going to like this,” she whispers. She opens the church bulletin and points to an announcement.

Father Porporino has retained the design firm of Patton & Persky of Philadelphia, Penn., to renovate our church. Patton & Persky are world-renowned interior designers with clients as diverse as the Liberty Rose Hotel in Philadelphia and the Crestview nursing home in Frenchtown . . .

I feel as though I’ve been stabbed.

My stomach begins to churn so loudly I grab my belt buckle as though it’s a volume-control panel. I blink several times and read the last line of the announcement:

The diocese has approved the selection. The renovation will begin this fall after the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

“I can’t believe he did this to you.” Capri takes my hand and squeezes it. “Are you okay?”

Shaking my head, I make an excuse and peel down the stairs, push open the side doors of the church, and suck in fresh air. That explains the smirk on Father’s face when I came to dress the altar, the sudden cancellation of the parish council meeting, and the church bulletins he hid until he knew I was long gone. It all makes sense now. He didn’t want to lower the boom in person. He wanted it to crash down around me once it was too late for me to object. I cannot believe that he went outside his own parish to find a decorator. Not only have I served this church faithfully
all my life,
from altar boy to altar dresser, but he knew what this renovation meant to me. I’ve been sandbagged!

“B! Don’t go!” Capri says from the door. She races down the steps. The plush vibrato of the organ sails out the windows sounding like the chug of a train going uphill. The congregation belts out “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love.”

“Did Father mention anything to you?” she asks when she catches up to me.

“Not a word.” My face heats up with embarrassment over having bared my creative soul to him. No wonder he looked at me like I smelled of rotten meat.

“Mom will talk to him.”

“No!” I nearly shout. “If this is how he feels, and this is what he thinks of my talent, let it go,” I sputter. Capri takes a step back. For the first time in forty years, she is afraid of me. The last thing I want is for her mother to fix this.

“Okay.” She raises her hands in the air like she’s under arrest. “I’m just trying to help. I know how much this means to you, that’s all.” She turns and goes up the stairs. She stops at the door, slips her glasses off, and puts her face in her hands.

“Capri, are you crying?” I feel terrible. I’ve never yelled at her before. I go up the stairs, stopping her before she goes back inside. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.” I take her in my arms. She wipes her tears on her sleeve and looks up at me. Her expression is like Saint Rose of Lima’s (the third stained-glass window on the right), filled with disappointment and hurt. I feel like I’m seeing her for the first time. “You have beautiful eyes,” I say quietly. I make a mental note that whenever I see something lovely, it pulls me out of whatever suffering I endure in the moment. “I never noticed before.”

“How can you even see them behind my glasses?” Capri sniffles as she pushes her hair behind her ear. She puts her prescription sunglasses back on.

“It’s not easy.”

Capri smiles. “You have a knack for saying the wrong thing.”

“I know,” I say apologetically.

“Mom is going to wonder where I went. I’d better go back in. Are you coming?”

“No . . . I can’t.”

Capri goes back into the church, and I catch my breath. The years of service to my parish spin through my head like confetti. I had such plans! I wanted to ditch the heavy eighteenth-century stuff and replace it with a modern, open field, thus creating a sense of space. I wanted to use soothing colors, like eggplant and nut-brown, on the walls and trim, to invoke nature and serenity. I imagined a sleek modern Communion railing, a simple Quaker-style altar, and the priest’s chair refurbished in a plum cut velvet with gold trim to pick up the veins of the marble statuary. I had mentally designed a shrine to the Blessed Mother—a contemporary white marble Madonna and child by Pizzo—that would replace the hand-painted cement statue. I planned to construct a simple backdrop for the statue, studded with pin lights and votive candles in a field below, creating an indoor grotto. I try to erase the pictures that have lived in my mind’s eye for so long, but they won’t disappear.

Oh, what I would have done with the opportunity! Our Lady of Fatima would have been a point of interest for the ecumenical tour buses that come through New Jersey during the jubilee years. Who knows? Perhaps, given the right circumstances, the church might have been the site of a miracle or two.

I can hear the murmur of the congregation as they plod through the Nicene Creed. Tears sting my eyes as I remember the joy this church has brought me through the years, starting with the All Saints Day parade on All Hallows’ Eve when I was six and wore a Saint Bartholomew costume and brandished an actual sword (on loan from Anthony Cappozolo, a generous member of the Knights of Columbus), to Toot’s brutally hot July wedding when I keeled over in the heat in my white gloves and tails and had to be carried out of the sacristy like a slab of plywood after repeated attempts to revive me with sips of holy water from the font, to every single confession I made in Lucky Booth Number Two since I was ten years old. I never made up sins like my peers did; I always told the truth—and this is how I’m thanked.

For the first time in thirty-three years I will miss my Sunday Communion, but I cannot bear to face the crowd of people who will know that I have been passed over like Clemmie Valentini’s stale cannolis on Bingo Night. How could Father do this to me? There is not a family in this parish whose home I have not decorated! Every chandelier, sconce, and drapes in this town was hung by my own hands! As for the diocese, this slight reverberates all the way to Bishop Kilcullen’s mansion in Rumson. How dare they!

As I park in the lot of the Weis Market in Wall Township, the only twenty-four-hour seven-day-a-week supermarket in the county, the shock of Father’s rejection has turned to anger, coupled with the guilt I feel about missing Sunday Mass. After all, I am a devout Catholic. I’ve never understood parishioners who left their church because the priest had wronged them. After all, it’s not the priest who knows our souls, it’s God. But now I understand. Evidently I’m not as devout as I thought I was, because I didn’t drive to Saint Catharine’s in Spring Lake for the noon Mass to fulfill my obligation, and I could have. No, this morning I feel finished with RC Incorporated.

One of the reasons I started my company in OLOF was to bring beauty to the town I grew up in. I could have easily gotten an apartment in New York City and swum with the big fish, vying to decorate Park Avenue apartments, Fifth Avenue penthouses, and Turtle Bay brownstones. Instead, I brought my education and gifts to the place where I was first inspired to do something wonderful with my life. Now I see that everything I believed in was a veneer. A local boy could never be good enough to redo the House of God.

When I was small and had a particularly rough go of things, Mama would make me a consolation cake called Our Lady of (Drown Your) Sorrows, with Heavenly Frosting. Current wisdom is that one must never reward or congratulate with food, or use it to soothe sadness. My mother disagreed, which might be why, when Toot and I are upset, agitated, or hurt, we like nothing better than whipping up a bowl of frosting. We used to take a box of confectioner’s sugar, a stick of soft sweet butter, a thimbleful of vanilla, and a shot of half-and-half, beat it into a creamy frosting, then grab spoons and take turns eating it out of the bowl. When we got old enough to enhance food with alcohol, we replaced the vanilla with a shot of Amaretto. Buttercream frosting is our family Valium, and boy do I need it now.

When I think about Eydie Von Gunne and how I bragged that I was doing a church renovation, I feel like I could crack open a bottle of cooking sherry and guzzle it before I reach the checkout. Instead, I throw the ingredients for Heavenly Frosting into the cart and envision an afternoon at home finding solace in a bottomless pan of sheet cake.

OUR LADY OF (Drown Your) SORROWS CAKE WITH HEAVENLY FROSTING

Yield: Enough for an army

CAKE

3 Milky Way bars, cut into small pieces

3 Three Musketeers bars, cut into small pieces

3 Snickers bars, cut into small pieces

1⁄2 cup butter

2 cups flour

1⁄2 teaspoon baking soda

1⁄2 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup sugar

1⁄2 cup shortening

3 eggs

1 cup buttermilk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease and flour a 9 by 13-inch baking pan. Melt the candy bars and butter in a saucepan. Blend. In a large bowl, mix the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and sugar. Then mix in the shortening and eggs. Beat well. Slowly add the buttermilk, beating until fluffy. Then add the vanilla and the candy-bar mixture from the saucepan. Beat well. Pour into the pan, and bake 60 minutes until done. When the cake is still hot, ice with:

HEAVENLY FROSTING

1 bag marshmallows, cut in half

1 cup chopped pecans

2 cups shredded coconut

1 box confectioner’s sugar

4 tablespoons cocoa

8 tablespoons heavy cream

4 tablespoons butter, softened

Place the marshmallow halves, sticky side down, on top of the hot cake. Scatter the nuts over the marshmallows, then a layer of coconut. In a bowl, whip the confectioner’s sugar, cocoa, cream, and butter. Pour over the hot cake. Serve when cool.

After I ice the cake, I lick the spoons, then wash the pans and straighten the kitchen. My head is throbbing, so I decide to take a nap. I go to my bedroom, climb into bed, and pull my silk wool afghan up to my chin. It’s the last thing I remember when I wake up an hour later. A cool breeze wafts through my bedroom doorway, and I sit up. I must’ve left the garage door open.

“Uncle B?”

I hear my nephew Two’s voice in the hallway.

“I’m in here,” I call out.

Two appears in the doorway of my bedroom. “Thank God,” he says when he sees me. “You didn’t answer the phone.”

“I was taking a nap.” In our family, if someone is missing for five minutes, we assume they are dead. No one has ever forgotten the day that Aunt Mirella Bontempo was scheduled to work the zeppole fryer at the OLOF Feast and didn’t show up. My cousin Mona Lisa instantly formed a search party. We found Auntie in her basement with her arm stuck in the agitator of the washing machine. She had been washing her bras and one of the straps had choked the main water pipe and broken the machine. When she reached in to yank the bra loose, her hand got stuck. We got there in the nick of time, as the water was up to her midcalf. It would have meant certain death, as Auntie was a poor swimmer.

“We were worried. Nellie Fanelli called Mom and said that she saw you go into church for Mass and then she didn’t see you in the Communion line.” Two goes to the window and yanks the pulley that opens the drapes.