Authors: Terri-Lynne Defino
“No, thank you. I don’t want to see another meatball for at least a month.”
Quiet as were the streets, On the Fire was packed, and only after walking in and waiting for a hostess did Benny realize it was full of family, not customers.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said to the hostess searching for an empty spot at the table. “The internet said you were open today.”
“We are,” the young lady told her. “We’ve just got a lot of family in for the holiday weekend. Hang on a sec. I’ll clear a space down at the end. You want to be next to one another, or across?”
“It doesn’t matter. Whatever you have.”
The hostess winked and left them.
“I’m going to use the ladies room,” Clarice whispered “I’ll be right back.”
Benny stood in the cool, taking it all in. Photos lined the dark, wood-paneled walls. Friends. Family. A whole lot of celebrities caught enjoying a meal and wine. Photos dating all the way back to the 1950s. Though there were a few tables-for-two along the wall, long tables dominated the floor, like a banquet or a wedding. The hostess was even now clearing a spot near the end of one of those tables still full of the large and obvious family already there.
If she had wondered how On the Fire lasted so long when so many eateries didn’t last five years, Benny no longer did. A meal here wasn’t just a night out, it was an event. It was a party. It was a good time with good people over good food. The scent of garlic and onions, basil and roasting meat didn’t just linger in the air. It permeated the walls, the curtains, the chairs and tables and floor. The aroma from decades of good food, hours of happiness, and thousands of conversation were ghosts unable to depart. Benny felt them as intimately as she did Augie before she accidently looked at him.
Her eyes were drawn to the portrait of an extraordinarily beautiful woman hanging on the back wall, her smooth cheek pressed to an old man’s lined one. Flora Fiore, or whatever her name had become after Augie’s supposed death. Benny glanced over the faces populating the place, both in the flesh and on the walls. Whether real or wistful thinking, she saw Flora’s nose here, her thick, curly hair there, the plump bow of her mouth everywhere. When the young hostess turned back to wave them to the table, Benny saw the thick, dark eyelashes of the woman in the portrait.
“You look like her.” Benny pointed to the portrait. “Is she a relative?”
“Nona Florina?” She smiled over her shoulder. “She was my great-grandmother. And thank you. She was ridiculously gorgeous.”
Benny’s heart fluttered. Augie’s great-great-granddaughter. So close she could throw her arms around her and hug her tight.
“You said was,” Benny said. “Does that mean she’s…departed?”
“Yeah, sadly. She’d have been ninety this year. Why? Did you know her?”
“Sort of. My mother grew up in this area. She remembers this place well. And…” How much should she say? If Flora would have been ninety, telling this girl she was friendly with her great-grandmother’s natural father was going to sound ridiculous. “It’s kind of complicated. I heard a sad story about a man who lived in my town, and as it happens, it’s about a woman, your Nona Florina, I think, who lived here where my mother grew up. I thought it was kind of kismet, so I dragged my mother back to the old digs to see if there was anything I could do to put an end to the story. Or at least appease my curiosity.”
“Kismet?”
“Fate?” Benny tried.
The girl nodded. “Oh, sorry. I’m Raquel, by the way. And you are?”
“Benedetta Grady,” Benny said. “But my mother’s maiden name was Cioffi.”
“Hey, Uncle Tony,” Raquel shouted over the noise behind her. “You know the name Cioffi?”
A big man about Clarice’s age stood up from the table, squinted their way. “Who’s asking?”
“This lady here says her mom’s a Cioffi and she used to—”
“Tony Pagano, is that you?” Clarice stood in front of the ladies’ room door, a hand to her chest and her mouth a perfect O.
Tony turned her way, his arms opened up. “Clara Cioffi, where the fuck’ve you been, ah?”
Benny was pulled in along with her mother, paesan’ returning home to Brooklyn. They were passed from person to person, introduced, kissed and hugged. They were coaxed into chairs and handed plates overflowing with fried calamari, eggplant rollatini, fried zucchini blossoms and, the house special since the doors first opened, braised rabbit. Benny felt as if she’d been thrown back in time. The only thing missing was one of those famous old crooners signing from the radio. As if out of her thoughts, someone changed the station from whatever soft jazz had been playing to the Sinatra satellite station.
…be where little cable cars climb halfway to the stars
The morning fog may chill the air, I don’t care…
“My love waits there,” Tony Pagano belted out along with the radio, his voice a surprising tenor. “Above the blue and windy sea…”
“When I come home to you, San Francisco,” everyone but Benny joined in. “Your golden sun will shine for me!”
“Oh, goodness,” Clarice—Clara to those in the restaurant—said breathlessly. “I was so in love with Tony Bennett as a girl. I named my only daughter after him.”
“Ma! Does Daddy know?”
“Of course not. So don’t you go telling him.” Clarice threw back her head and laughed, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright.
Tony put an arm around the back of her chair as it started to wobble, and his wife slapped playfully at his arm. Benny imagined her mother as a much younger woman, sitting in this very restaurant with these same people, a complete stranger. She had always known that Clarice Cioffi left Brooklyn for college, met the man she would marry and didn’t go back, but she never imagined her making jokes and laughing too loud, singing along with the radio.
This is who she was. Benny’s eyes strayed to Tony Pagano’s wife. That is who she would have been.
“You guys sure picked the right day to come,” Raquel said, leaning over Benny’s shoulder. “I don’t think my uncle is going to let her leave.”
Benny checked her watch. It was already after two, they had a nearly three-hour drive ahead of them, and she had found out nothing about Flora other than she was this girl’s great-grandmother.
“This is going to sound strange,” she said to Raquel, “but is there someone I can talk to about your Nona Florina.”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” Raquel straightened. “Ma!”
A woman Benny thought had been introduced as Tina looked their way. Benny hushed Raquel as inconspicuously as possible.
“It’s okay. I’ll go talk to her myself, thanks.” Benny headed toward Raquel’s mother, hand extended. “Tina, right?”
“Yeah, Christina, but everyone calls me Tina.”
Benny sat in the empty chair beside her. “You own this place?”
“Sort of. On the Fire has always been family run and owned, but I’m in charge, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Actually, I wanted to talk about Flora.”
“My grandmother?”
Benny’s gaze flicked quickly to a pair of women obviously listening. She turned her back, lowered her voice. “This is going to sound a little strange, but someone who loved her very much lived in Bitterly, the town where I am from, and he—”
“Bitterly, Connecticut?”
“You’re familiar with it?”
“I know of it.”
Tina said no more for a long moment, instead looking carefully at Benny through narrowed eyes. Beautiful eyes, but not Flora’s.
“It’s not me you want to talk to,” Tina said at last. “You want my mother.”
“One of Flora’s daughters?”
Tina nodded. “She’s not here, though. She doesn’t come out much since Pop died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“You know how these old Italians are. Pop’s been gone ten years and she’s still wearing black. Only time she goes out is for another funeral.”
“You sure she’ll talk to me?”
“About Nona Florina?” Tina grinned. “Oh, she’ll talk. If there’s one thing old Italians like better than a funeral, it’s talking about the dead. Saints, every one of them. But in Nona’s case, it’s true. Come with me.”
Benny followed Tina to a hallway in the back of the restaurant and, after looking once over her shoulder, followed her into it. At the end was a staircase leading up, to a surprisingly big and airy apartment that smelled as garlicky-good as it did downstairs. The spotless furniture came straight out of the fifties. The couch in the parlor was covered in plastic, as were the two wingback chairs. Above the ancient fireplace hung a ceramic relief of The Last Supper. On the mantel, figurines of the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis of Assisi perched among the tchotchke from New York City, Venice, and Rome.
On every creamy-white wall hung a crucifix. On every flat surface was a silk flower arrangement sitting atop a doily crocheted by some long-deceased relative, Benny was certain. In the arched opening separating the living space from the bedrooms, Tina told her to wait while she knocked on a closed door.
“Mama?” Tina’s voice was softer than it had been downstairs. “You sleeping?”
“In the middle of the day?” came the quick response, but slumber trembled the high, frail voice. “What is it, dear? Everything all right downstairs?”
“Everything’s fine. I brought someone to see you.”
“Oh, I’m not presentable for company.”
“Mama, don’t be silly. It’s just an old friend of a friend.”
Tina went into the room and closed the door behind her. Muffled voices and what sounded like the news on the television or radio came through the wall. While she waited, Benny studied the dozens of framed photos on the wall. Kids’ school pictures spanning the decades from the black-and-white sixties through the photo-shopped, neon backgrounds of the present. Wedding photos, graduation photos, baby’s first Christmas-Easter-Halloween photos. Benny tried to match the young faces to the older ones. Familial traits became obvious—the hook of a nose, the exotic eyes and lashes like thick smudges of coal. She wondered which of those traits belonged to Augie, and then wondered how he was able to write off this whole piece of what should have been his life.
He didn’t.
That’s why he’s stuck.
“Benedetta?” Tina’s head appeared around the doorjamb. “Her highness is ready to see you now.”
“Christina Marie!”
Tina winked.
Benny smiled. “We share a middle name.”
“Yeah, the two of us and about ninety percent of all Italian girls.” Tina gestured her back into the parlor. “Even Nona Florina’s middle name was Maria.”
Benny sat on the couch that squeaked when she did so. Tina rolled her eyes and they shared an unspoken joke, softly, so the tiny woman breezing into the room didn’t hear them. She was as frozen in the 1970s as her home was in the 1950s. The jet-black, old-lady-helmet-short hair, penciled-in eyebrows and lipstick the color of bubblegum made her a dolled-up version of Edith Bunker, right down to the sensible shoes and nylons, the starched apron over her knee-length, black dress. She had none of Flora’s visible grace and beauty, though she had certainly passed on the genes to her granddaughter, Raquel. When she lowered herself daintily to the wingback chair—that also squeaked—she perched on the edge like a bird poised and ready to fly off.
“Mama, this is Benedetta Grady. Benedetta, this is my mother, Mrs. Iapaluccio.”
“You may call me Carmen,” she said.
“And please, call me Benny.”
Carmen inclined her head. “Who are your people, Benny?”
“My people?”
“I told her your mother used to live here in Bensonhurst. She’s asking your family name.”
“Oh, Cioffi,” Benny answered, and Carmen’s cheeks pinked.
“I remember the family well. Good people. I don’t think there are any left in the neighborhood anymore.”
“I don’t think so either.”
“Well then.” Carmen smoothed her apron. “Christina tells me you knew someone who loved my mother? Someone from your home town?”
“I do, kind of. It’s a bit complicated…” Benny stuck to the truth as much as possible, leaving the implausible out completely. Those things she had learned of Augie and his daughter left behind in Italy, she said she read in some old letters her friend, who lived in the house Augie built for his second family, found in the cellar during renovations. Tina and Carmen exchanged glances, but neither interrupted her.
“So here I am in Brooklyn,” she said, “hoping to put this story to rest. From what I’ve learned, he died without ever telling Flora who he was, without ever fulfilling his promise to her. I hoped his daughter was still living, and that I could tell her about her father, and how sorry he was, maybe put his spirit to rest.”
“You think it is restless?” Carmen asked.
“I do, yes.” Benny looked her straight in the eyes. “It sounds a little nuts-o, but when I visit his grave, I feel it. He was afraid to put this to rights in life. It weighed on him before his death. I can only imagine it continued after.”
Carmen looked at her, head cocked and eyes wide. “You are sensitive to such things. I can tell.”
“Mama, come on. Don’t start.”
“You hush. I may not have inherited my mother’s great beauty, but I did inherit her sensitivity. I perceive things others don’t.” She leaned closer to Benny. “You understand what I mean, don’t you, dear?”
Tina blew out an exaggerated breath.
Benny nodded.
Carmen continued looking at her, a gentle smile playing at her lips. “Would you fetch Nona Florina’s album for me, Tina? It’s in my chest, down in the cellar.”
“Sure, Mama.” She groaned as she stood up, the couch squeaking along with her. “Don’t creep Benny out while I’m gone.”
Benny fidgeted. The couch squeaked and she stilled. The uneasy sensation of being out of a loop she should know all about raised the hair on her arms. Carmen reached over and patted her knee.
“You look like you just swallowed a bug, dear.”
“I do? Oh. Sorry.”
Carmen’s laughter sounded like fluttering bird wings. “I can see it in you. But I can also see you hold it in check. It’s all right dear.” She stopped Benny’s protest with a tiny, raised hand. “Some of us are content to simply accept they are there.”
It was on the tip of Benny’s tongue to tell this sweet, strange woman the truth behind her visit, but it would take far too long, and she was not entirely certain Carmen, who was looking beyond her rather than at her, actually had all her marbles.