The mother learned that the airlines preferred twenty-one day notice, in order to guarantee the best connections and a reasonable price. But on the other hand there were flights to New York every day.
Of course she couldn’t make reservations till she had a better idea when Jay’s mother was arriving. Grandma Aurora never gave a thought to the extra expense of last-minute travel, and there was always the chance that she’d wait till after Fourth of July. The old woman loved those fireworks. She would’ve flown all five kids in and out of Manhattan just for the night of the show, she was such a doting grandmother. Which was precisely what Barbara needed, while she left the country to make divorce arrangements. During recent Christmases and birthdays Barb had bit her tongue, fighting down the impulse to snap at Aurora over how she spoiled the children. But that same sort of lavish indulgence would be good for John Junior and the others, briefly, after Mom and Pop shared the bad news. Sure it would, briefly; Jay saw the logic too. The husband too felt that they should wait for his mother to join them, in these vast and airy new digs, before he and Barbara “hit,” as he put it, “some kind of point of no return.”
Husband and wife had had this conversation maybe an hour after the family at last clambered out of their NATO ride; it took that long for Jay and Barb to get some time alone. But Barbara had no trouble reiterating, quietly but firmly, what she’d announced at DiPio’s clinic. The Jaybird took it with the same hurt as before, with the same question as before. “Why?” he asked. But as soon as Jay understood that Barbara intended to hold off taking action until Aurora arrived, he’d agreed. For a moment he’d been puzzled, fingering the gauze over his temple: “What does my Mom have to do with…?” But then he’d clapped a hand across his mouth, audibly. He’d narrowed his eyes and nodded.
Besides that Jay heard her out closed-mouthed, except to say he loved her.
Now in the light of the Naples day, either the day after or the one after that, Jay’s mother’s daughter-in-law sat in a travel agency wondering just what she should say herself Barbara came out of the place frowning. The vista before her turned out to be the prettiest she’d yet seen, outside her own neighborhood. A flower-bedecked piazza, it opened towards island ferries white as toothpaste, a high-shouldered castle the color of charcoal ash, and the up-shooting gem-glimmer of twinned fountains. Barb took it in and then turned away, once more heading for the deep urban shadows just upslope. She needed a church and prayer.
Yet whatever sanctuary the mother came to, while back on the cliff-top her older children watched the younger ones, the holy words to which she gave voice would turn to husks. She thought of the ojetti; she thought of the corpses from over in Pompeii, hollow and baked. It didn’t help that at home she spent so much energy keeping up a front, likewise gold- or silver-plated, in order to evade the kids’ radar. These days their little emotional sensors kept picking up UFOs. Barbara could practically see the things herself, blobs that drifted across the screen out of an unknown quadrant. She had to keep smiling, up in her wide kitchen and out on her new balconies, and she had to pay their father a constant lip service. The effort left her tugging at her armpits and beltline.
And the morning she took the kids downtown, the playacting got that much worse. Barbara hadn’t realized that, after the video on the evening news and the stories in the morning papers, she and Paul had become Madonna and Child. They could hardly go half a block without someone coming up for a blessing. Barb herself, the previous morning, had poked around incognito; she had the strong Campanian genes. But nobody could fail to recognize Paul. That day like every day, he wore the outfit that the locals had seen on TV: a starched white shirt and black perma-press pants.
At least down in the old city, amid the hawkers and masons and miracle-seekers, the middle child showed his mother something better than an obsessive-compulsive wardrobe. Paul revealed as well a mastery of street theater, acknowledging each new supplicant with a disarming hipshot posture, fey but friendly. The boy paced himself, taking neither too much time nor too little with the bric-a-brac offered, now a crucifix and now another of the votive bas-reliefs. He gave each a touch and a murmur, no more. Barbara was relieved by the child’s command of the stage — you go, girl — but she still couldn’t believe there was anything supernatural about it. Rather, what she saw was the wiles of a younger brother. Since coming off the plane Paul had kept an eye on his two elders, both of them loud and bumptious, obvious Americans.
So the kids were one burden. The Jaybird was another, in on the nasty secret and yet, these days, such a nice guy. When he complimented Barbara’s looks, the man offered sweet nothings the likes of which she hadn’t heard in years. Naturally she could see through his ploy, his own silver-tongued go at Paul’s healing touch. But she couldn’t begin to explain the slick and muscular way in which she’d repaid his kind words, two nights out of three. Two nights out of three, after they’d found themselves alone, she and Jay had tumbled into fucking. Fucking seemed to be the word for it, an angry business well-nigh impossible to make sense of. The grind and sigh were familiar, granted, as were the sensations of climax. These seemed to buck off her caked-on experience until Barbara was returned to layered glass, knitted and flexible, and between the glass gaps some other flesh-bound portion of her skied downward, hooting. Yet the need to come like that wasn’t the same desire she used to know. Her greediness erupted in the middle of bedtime, it cut into her sleep, even as it set up a wholly unrecognizable counterpoint to the prayers that Barbara kept attempting during her days. Her downtown rosaries were supposed to offer Extreme Unction. At the end of everything, absolution.
The husband, beneath his bandages, must’ve suffered the same confusion. Like Barbara he couldn’t think of anything sensible to say about their lovemaking. Rather, in the mornings as they shared a cappuccino, or in the evenings as he helped with the dishes, the Jaybird found other things to talk about. In particular, he was interested in Owl and the kids making a tour of his job site. He thought it would be good for the family to visit the Refugee Center.
“What we’re doing up there,” he said, “think about it. It’s good work.”
Was this was the second morning after the morning of the attack? Was it the third? In any case the man checked over his broad shoulder, in his white chef’s top, making sure none of the children were in earshot. Then, just above a whisper:
“I mean, if it’s over between us, okay. If that’s what has to happen, okay. But you should at least get a good look at the kind of guy you’re leaving.”
Barbara knew this gambit too: calling the bluff.
‘You should have a look, Owl. The kids too, the kids especially. Hey, you know Silky’ll drive. You know he loves to take out that Humvee.”
Barb shook her head, though she couldn’t say just what she meant by it. She might’ve been declining a trip out to the Refugee Center, tomorrow or the next day, or she might’ve been shaking off the wild ride she’d taken in the bedroom down the hall, just the night before. Trying to understand, there at the table and later in the church, she recalled some of the seedier confessions she’d heard at the Samaritan Center. She remembered in particular an all-but-divorced couple who’d enjoyed a standup quickie on the way to their final mediation session. They’d done it in the elevator, those two, and now Barbara herself seemed none the wiser. Under her polished surface she seemed nothing but contradictory animal impulses: lick or destroy.
Which might be what she sensed, ultimately, in the pitch and rhythm of the original city. Downtown, everything revved with savage pretending. On all sides, even in streets jammed from wall to scaffold, hustling couples and threesomes kept up a baroque and airy masquerade. The performing style, the hands perpetually in the air, manifested itself in the hustlers and executive track alike, whether you were wearing a hand-me-down soccer shirt or a glittering silk tie. Even the people walking unattached made small gestures, the same sort of scene-stealing business Barbara had noticed in Mr. Paul. In particular these people had a shrug that was more than a shrug, an effort of the entire body, requiring a pause between strides. In the moment of that pause, fixed in place with shoulders hiked, a Neapolitan would look like one of the plated ojetti.