No Time to Wave Goodbye Page 6

Al told them, “We got sick of the crazies that come out at the full moon. We got ourselves unlisted now. But we still advertise. We still offer a reward for information.”

  Vincent had remembered his mother slamming down the phone, uttering words that, at age eight, he understood as “You funning buster!” Wearing pajama pants and his father’s old shirts, with unwashed hair and greasy skin, she’d occasionally had the fegato to tell the cranks off. Other times, she didn’t pick up. She sat on the sofa, her green eyes wide, her hands limp around Kerry’s little tummy, where Vincent had ritually placed them. He heard one time what they said: I saw your little boy with a good family. Not like your godless family. He’s better off because you left the church, Elizabeth. You’re on God’s shit list, Beth. You and your Dago husband. You deserve this.

  Who was it who talked about crank callers in the film? Penny? He wasn’t about to mention it now. He’d already given his mother worry for ten lifetimes with all he’d done—not just the Ben thing but after Ben came home, for years, up until … now. But he longed to ask, how had she hung on to even strings of her mind? How had she forgiven Vincent for being such a prick, for hating her? Vincent had hated her. Dad took a powder for the restaurant—first Uncle Augie’s in Madison, then their own. Mom had the phone calls, the psychics, the endless letters, cards decorated with the Holy Cross or puppies or rainbows, the Protestant zealots, and the tipsters. She had Vincent, terrified, jumping up and down like a Jack Russell terrier trying to get her to see him, then stealing lunch cards and pencils, then cash and candy, then booze and cars. And Kerry, a confused and messy little ragamuffin … and Candy.

  Maybe Candy’s friendship, like a lighthouse, was how Vincent’s mother had managed not to lose her mind altogether.

  “How did you finally get Ben to come in?” Beth asked, interrupting Vincent’s thoughts.

  “He just did finally. I was about to give up. And I said, Al and Eileen, this is my brother, Sam Cappadora,” Vincent said. “And you can imagine how they took that. The name-switch thing.”

  “Yes,” Beth said. Her skin seemed to grow taut. A pause lengthened like a penny dropped into a deep well. “What did they say?”

  Vincent answered slowly. “Eileen asked, wasn’t your brother Benjamin? And Ben told them he … he didn’t remember the time he had that name. He was more comfortable with Sam.” Vincent watched his mother. “He said …”

  “Yes,” she said. “I know what he said. Ben said his dad called him that.”

  “And … well, you can imagine.”

  “I bet Mrs. Cafferty said something like, that must break your mother’s heart,” Beth said evenly. Vincent bit his lip. Eileen had said that, word for word.

  “So then we moved on….”

  “You don’t have to protect me, Vincent,” Beth said. “If you wanted to protect me, you shouldn’t have made the film at all. I don’t mean that as a put-down. I know he told them about George. He must have. And that he calls us Pat and …”

  “Well, right. Anyhow, Ben ignored the list of questions. Ben asked, was Alana a gymnast? And, wouldn’t she be at the perfect age to compete nationally now? And I thought, great! When we leave, these people are going to get out some clothesline and hang themselves in the garage! But Al said that was just what he thought …”

  “I remember,” Beth said, snapping her fingers. “Someone wanted their own little champion. Or maybe they had a child who died … like Cecil.”

  “Ah, yeah,” Vincent said, who now wanted not just to leave, but to sprint across the yard like Carl Lewis. He got up and brushed off his pants. “I’m cold. Are you cold?”

  “I’m fine,” Beth said. “The pictures of that little girl. You nailed that, Vincent. His face and then that great bit of the little girl performing.” She meant the footage of Alana’s floor exercise to the old song “Happy Talk,” from South Pacific.

  “Ma, these gymnastics meets and beauty pageants and stuff for kids, they’re like a farmer’s market for pedophiles. You know? Buy a wristband and pretend you’re somebody’s uncle, and take your pick. That’s what I think happened to Alana. Somebody remembered seeing a white van with some kind of painting on the side.” Vincent paused. “White vans. The vehicle of choice for serial killers. And they told us about one time they might have gotten an authentic call. Someone called and they heard the background noise, like a meet, an announcer and all that, and someone said something that sounded like ‘Mama,’ and they thought it was Alana.”

  “That must have been hellish. At least that never happened to us.”

  That you know of, Vincent thought, thinking of the years he’d sat astride his bike, watching Ben whack the puck in his driveway. And he had left out the part about how he couldn’t swallow when Eileen told them that Adam, the little brother, used to sneak in and sleep in Alana’s bed. He’d left that part out of the film, too. When he heard the Caffertys say that, Vincent nearly lost it. He was eleven years old again, asleep in Ben’s bed with Ben’s misshapen toy rabbit, Igor, stuffed carefully under his stomach so that Dad wouldn’t see it and think he was a sissy or something.

  “She said she wouldn’t want to be alive, except that they were having the baby, and Ben said, I told my mom once that there were things worse than dying.”

  “Ben did say that. And he’s right. Dying is an answer. That was a question.”

  Vincent thought of the last moments, of all saying, One minute we had all the time in the world. Next minute, no time to wave to her.

  That was when Vincent thought of the title … no time to wave goodbye. Or had he always known it? He turned to his mother, but she had silently gotten up and motioned for him to follow her inside.

  He wondered if he had gone too far.

  He caught up with Beth halfway across the backyard. They began to laugh as they remembered his bagel, which Beth said must have the consistency now of a hockey puck. And casually, as though she did this all the time, Beth took Vincent’s hand.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I’ve spent my life finding creative ways to get out of hosting parties,” Beth said. “And this will make, what, five in a year? The wedding shower, the baby shower, the movie party. You do it.”

  “My house is too small,” Candy said.

  That much was true. Candy had added on to her little Baltis brownstone after she adopted Eliza, but the whole place was still the size of a very austere, timelessly fashionable camper. “I don’t see why there has to be a reception for everything anyhow.”

  “Eliza would absolutely kill me if there was no reception after Stella’s christening. She’s the queen of receptions.”

  They both stopped and Beth pictured Eliza at her wedding, in size zero Vera Wang, dancing in her bare feet with Ben to the tarantella, with the flower girls, Candy’s twin grandnieces, in copies of the bride’s gown, holding the twenty-foot train and spinning in and out like crazy little spools. On a dime, the couple suddenly stopped and the orchestra struck up “Bella Notte,” from Lady and the Tramp, and Ben and Liza, who had secretly taken ballroom dancing lessons for the occasion, spun around the room like a prince and princess.

  Candy recalled Eliza’s face as Candy made her toast, about how her friend, Liza’s godmother Beth, had given her the courage to dare the one thing she was always too frightened to try to be—a mother—and about how Eliza had been just the kid to prove Candy was right to take the dare.

  She asked Beth now if she remembered the little speech.

  “Sheesh,” Beth finally said. “Guilt much? I want her to have a reception. I just hate it when I’m responsible for people being comfortable.”

  Candy said, “How nurturing.” She paused. “Okay. I’ll host it. Or maybe George Karras will have it at his house. He has a big house.”

  “Shut up! You’re so bad! It’s a burr under Pat’s saddle that we even invite George to these things,” Beth said. “I actually like having him. I’m used to him.”

  “Okay. I’ll pay for everything. Even the cucumber sandw
iches. On a civil servant’s salary.”

  “You don’t have cucumber sandwiches in January,” Beth said. “You have meatballs and hot bread. Stuff people can spill on clothes they have to take to the dry cleaners.” She got up to fetch Candy more of Rosie’s almond cookies. Candy had probably already eaten a dozen, easy. Though she never gained a pound, to Beth’s knowledge, Candy had never done a day’s exercise in her life that didn’t entail the fitness minimals of the job. Season to season, Beth never knew if she’d have to belt her jeans or use a pliers to zip them, and Candy remained as lean and absent of topography as the flawless skinny skirts and wide-legged slacks she wore, summer and winter. At a moment’s challenge, she could drop and do thirty guy push-ups.

  Katharine Hepburn genes, Beth thought. What a waste not to have passed them on—although if she had given birth to a child, there would have been no Eliza. What a waste for someone like this woman not to have someone she adored to warm up her bed each night. Candy’s life had been an arrow pointed at sheltering children from the kind of people who would make beds cold and terrifying places, where no rest would come.

  “Don’t be a snot,” Beth went on, handing Candy the cookie plate. “Gold Hat will do it. You don’t have to pay full price. You’re family. And fine! I give up! We’ll have it here and we’ll pay. Happy now?”

  “Why, yes I am,” said Candy in her best Southern belle voice. She had, after all, grown up in Atlanta. She placidly completed her tenth invitation and held it up to show Beth that she’d already written Beth and Pat’s address as the party location. Beth rolled her eyes.

  “You take me for granted.”

  “Ditto,” Candy said. “You know what? I once thought … I would be writing Vincent and Eliza Cappadora.”

  Beth set her pen down hard. “Get out! Vincent? You thought Eliza would marry Vincent? How could you wish that on your child? He’s not exactly husband material.”

  “Don’t go telling me what husband material is, Beth. Vincent’s … an amazing human being. He’s entirely heart.”

  “Not to me. Well, a little better now. Maybe.”

  “We’ve talked about this for twenty years, Beth. Vincent worships you.”

  “Not enough to tell me what his movie was about.”

  “Exactly.”

  Beth said, “Why did you think she’d marry either of my sons?”

  “She’s too good for anyone else.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Beth said. “Do you really think this?”

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean,” Candy said pleasantly. “But back to the reception. What I’ll do is have people to pass the trays around and put the gifts on a table.”

  “Off-duty cops you’ll force to do it,” Beth went on. “Wait! You’re changing the subject …”

  “That’s what off-duty cops are for,” Candy answered. “That and house-painting. I pay them well.”

  They finally agreed that the priest from Beth’s old parish, Father Cleary, would perform Stella’s baptism, before Mass on the second Sunday in January, but he would come to the Catholic church in Harrington, which the Cappadoras sort of attended. It was called St. Lawrence the Grail, although Ben—who thought Harrington wasn’t really a town but instead a pretentious cluster of one-acre houses on one-acre lots plopped on some of the best farmland on earth—had renamed the church St. Lucrative the Gas Grill. It was tiny compared to the Lutheran church, which was the size of a Sears store. Pat said the Lutheran church confirmed his belief that there was a WASP plot to take over the world.

  Eliza and Ben were staying at Beth’s house the night before the christening and the night after as well because Beth’s children hadn’t seen each other since the screening—Vincent had worked overnight so many times before the film was finally released, two weeks late, that he’d literally slept through Christmas Day. As godfather, he was not only coming to Chicago, but staying a few days afterward. Beth couldn’t wait for a chance to photograph all three of them, as well as Eliza and Stella.

  “Who are all these people?” Candy was asking, holding up the handwritten list and shaking it.

  Beth agreed but asked, “Who would you leave out? The old people? The Mob guys? Janice Dicksen from the movie? She lives on the South Side, right here.”

  “You invited all of the people from the movie?” Candy said. Beth shrugged.

  “Ben wanted to,” she said.

  At that moment, Candy’s pager went off and she answered without preamble, “Where? I am out almost to Rockford. Get Jimmy to come in. NO. Not Emma Witcherly or Ray. Jimmy. And I’ll be there by … later on. By tonight. If you like the father anyhow…. He is, huh? Well, isn’t that fucking spectacular.” Candy snapped her phone closed. She wrote out two more invitations in silence. Then she said to Beth, “It’s freezing in here. Do you have a sweater I can use?”

  Beth trotted up the stairs and brought back a thick nubbly cardigan. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Do you want to tell me?”

  “No,” Candy said and went back to addressing the invitations.

  “Okay,” Beth agreed, as she always did when Candy threw up the shield of her professional life.

  “It’s a baby. Murdered and thrown in St. Michael Reservoir like a piece of garbage. Dad’s an old friend of ours, nice druggie snitch. But he changed his ways recently. Discovering the glories of crystal meth.”

  “St. Michael Reservoir is the first place …”

  “We looked for Ben. Uh-huh.” Candy covered her face, then glanced up at Beth. “Can you finish these? I have to go. I have to.” Beth stood up and tried to hug Candy, who shrugged her off with a repentant touch on Beth’s wrist. “I can’t bear it. These things drive me nuts. They did since Ben’s case. And it was worse when I got Eliza. Now, with Stella …”

  “Keep the sweater. It’s cold today.”

  “That’s how they found her. The creek froze.”

  Three weeks later, Beth’s job was to pick up the Madonna and child (and Ben, too) the night before the ceremony. That meant also picking up about eighty bundles of silver-and-pink-wrapped packages—the trunk overflowed, and there was barely room for Stella in her car seat in the back of Beth’s Range Rover. She was glad, for the first time, that she had the bigger car, although Pat had needed to pry the keys of her eight-year-old Toyota out of her hands and give them to Kerry.

  “Presents just keep coming, Auntie!” Eliza said, with childish glee. “Some of them are from people who aren’t even going to be there. They don’t even get food!”

  It was at times like these that Beth was reminded that once, Eliza used to line up with thirty other children, by order of height, to receive a single blue cotton shirt and pants, which, after she turned five, she was expected to wash weekly by hand. Candy used to find her daughter in the laundry room, patiently watching the clothes spin in the machine. She worried that Eliza was autistic until Eliza learned enough English to explain that she was trying to look behind the washer at “the lady making it go.” In Bolivia, a baby at the orphanage was only another mouth to feed, not a cause for pretty presents.

  Beth settled Eliza and the exquisitely chuckling four-month-old Stella. Buckling himself into the front seat, Ben promptly fell asleep. Stella had slept like an angel for six weeks then decided that the nighttime world was beguiling. Because Eliza wanted to start taking a few classes beginning next week, they’d begun to supplement the breast with the bottle, so Ben could feed her, which he did—every hour. When he came home from work at one or two a.m., Stella was all smiles.

  Tonight, Beth thought greedily, she would do that—the cuddling, the changing, the feeding, carrying Stella in to Eliza only once. Ostensibly, it was to let the young couple have a night to rest. But Beth had not wakened to a baby in so long…. Did mothers who’d had the full complement of years with their children yearn in this way? she wondered. Was it even more poignant? From nowhere, at the wedding, Candy had said that she felt like she had only just gotten Eliza and was already losing her. Beth said no
thing then but felt this same thing exactly. The years of her motherhood had been cored by the loss of Ben.

  “Sam can’t wait to see Vincent,” Eliza whispered as, next to her, Stella’s lashes brushed her cheeks. “They’ve talked on the phone three times today already. Whenever Miss Eats Every Minute isn’t awake, he keeps saying, ‘Do you know how well the picture is doing? Do you know it won the star at the Toronto Film Festival?’ Sam is so proud.” Beth smiled, realizing how it still jarred her to realize that Liza had never known her husband by his given name. Eliza went on, “Auntie? Have you heard … any more about the movie? Like today?”

  “Just that Vincent said last night they’re getting booked into real theaters all over the place. And I’ll have all three of my kids together tonight.” She paused and grinned into the rearview mirror. “I mean all four of my kids … and my grandchild. Under the same roof for two whole nights.”

  “You’re lucky my mom let me leave! When I take Stella outside, Mom wants to wrap her up like we’re going dog-sledding in Alaska….”

  “It’s probably colder here than in Alaska right now,” Beth said.

  “But Auntie, she’s so … overprotective…. She’s always saying, ‘Now, Eliza, I don’t know. She’s barely four months old. Taking her out of her environment …’ Actually, what my mom would have said is, I think it’s goddamn foolish taking a baby out in this goddamn …” Both women laughed, Beth feeling an interior crescent of gold unfurl as she always did when Eliza called her “auntie” in the Mediterranean way, the affectionate name for a godmother or any older woman relative.

  “You don’t get your mom, Liza,” Beth said. “You were her … um … this isn’t going to mean anything to you. But once there was a knight called Lancelot …”

  “The Holy Grail,” Eliza said. “Duh. I read the myths when I was little.”

  “Well, this is no myth. That was you for her.”

  Eliza shook her head. She pointed to Ben’s face on Beth’s keychain—Kerry’s gift of a heart-shaped gold picture frame that enclosed a photo of all three of them when they were small—the one that jangled beside the one Eliza had given her and Candy, with Stella’s photo. “My husband was that for her.”