Free Vatican Waltz by Roland Merullo Page B

I’d spend half an hour in her room, massaging her calves and feet, making sure she had anything she wanted in the way of food and drink and blankets and medication. My father had always been very close to her, and he took to spending hours in the room with her, too, sometimes talking but more often just sitting there with his hands folded in his lap, watching her, watching me whenever I came in. There was something almost boyish about him in those last weeks of her life, as if he were remembering the days when the two of them had been very young, marching through the town square in uniform, starting the school day with a pledge to Mussolini that my father still partly remembered: “Nice, Corsica, Malta, all these belong to the great Italia.…” My father was, as the saying goes, not good with death, and I could feel the fear coming off him in waves; he’d seen his wife and mother-in-law die; he didn’t want to be left alone again. Sometimes, if the timing was right, we’d leave the hospital together and ride back to Revere in his car, and if he said anything on those rides, it would never be about his sister’s illness. “Do we have the milk?” he’d ask. “Do you want me to start the tomatoes now, inside, or wait?”
    Two or three times Aunt Chiara said something like “Cynthia, you’ve almost taken the pain completely away.” But if my father noticed, he never mentioned it to me. He thought, I’m sure, that his sister was just trying to make me feel useful and appreciated. She’d been raised as an Old World Italian girl, unfailingly pleasant, polite, kind, thoughtful, considerate, always putting others’ needs ahead of her own. We’d had a good relationship, but I’d always felt I couldn’t get as close to her as I wanted to, that she was surrounded by a soft cushion of
niceness
and it kept her from being completely real with me.
    In my aunt’s last days I massaged her legs as often as I could, and it seemed to bring her real comfort. I wasn’t there at the moment of her death, and I regret that. It seems to happen that way so often. I was with her and with her and with her, my father was with her, and then he was exhausted and left to go home and I stayed. It was midnight; I knew she was failing. I took a short nap. It was two a.m. Finally I stepped out and walked down to the cafeteria to get myself a cup of coffee, and when I came back to the room she had died.
    My father’s reaction surprised me. He was a different kind of Old World soul than his sister. He was on the gruff side, as I’ve said, often distant and aloof, a man’s man. He’d always worked with men, he gambled with men, he bowled with men, he was good to me but not particularly affectionate, and really, after I turned eight or nine we never had much in the way of a substantive conversation. Certainly, despite the Italian American stereotype, he was never a man who showed a great deal of emotion, but after Aunt Chiara died, he had periods of being almost inconsolable. He spent those days watching television or pacing the back yard, buried in grief. I’d come home from work and find him with tears on his face, standing at the stove. He wasn’t cooking anything, he wasn’t even making tea, just standing there, crying.
    One night that spring, tired from the long day and the loud subway ride, I spent half an hour in St. Anthony’s and then went home, intending to make my father supper, and found him sitting in the living room. That wasn’t so unusual. But the TV was turned off and it was getting dark and he was sitting there with his hands on the arms of the chair, staring out the window. When I stepped through the door, he looked at me, and it was as if he were seeing me for the first time. Familiarity breeds contempt, people say, but I think it’s truer that familiarity breeds taking for granted. When you live with people day in and day out for years, you become so accustomed to them that you can stop seeing them. You half look