Really, the boys’ little “prison-break” was nothing that Mom should worry about. “We had a good time, over there. Sant’Elmo, it’s got all these neat places to hide.”
The mother’s voice tightened, though with the grandmother in the apartment she couldn’t shout. Had JJ forgotten how, just the day before…?
The boy rolled his eyes. “Nobody’s gunning for us, Mom. That was all about Our Man in NATO.”
Barbara’s husband had given her the same assurances, or reassurances, during their walk along the waterfront. Of course the couple had their protection inching along the boulevard behind them, a Consular sedan, bulletproof. Roebuck had arranged the car, the driver, and the armed guard. But Barbara and Jay got the time alone that the husband had announced they “could use,” following “a meeting like this, a roller coaster.” The two of them strolled close by the small boats tethered to the rocks, wooden craft many of them, hand-painted. With the rumble of the other traffic, with the breeze and the sea, husband and wife could speak from the heart. The Jaybird had pointed out that up at the Refugee Center, during the near-month since his near-kidnap, the American Boss had often spent as much as an hour out of sight of his flak-jacketed protectors. If Silky’s crooks had wanted a piece of him, they’d had plenty of opportunity.
Barbara had nodded but frowned. Even as she and her husband talked, she’d noticed a refugee African on their tail. When they’d gone out along the breakwater, she’d called Jay’s attention to the man, an obvious clandestino. The poor guy hung back behind the Consulate’s Audi, in a torn t-shirt bearing a broken pillar.
The Jaybird had rolled his eyes — the expression that John Junior would imitate a few hours later. He’d asked if his Owl Girl was frightened of beggars all of a sudden. Frightened of the homeless, in this city? The husband could understand she’d been shaken up; her change of heart made everything more vulnerable, more precious.
Barbara had cut the man off, letting him know what she’d seen on the website.
Jay had taken the news calmly, looking over their skinny tag-along. The African stared back over their freshly-polished ride, no doubt trying to assess whether they might give him a Euro. Barb at first hadn’t felt her husband’s touch at her hip.
Today, he’d told her, we start over. It’s all going to be on another basis. No lying and no doubletalk.
They confronted their two oldest that evening, as soon as the boys revealed how they’d gone waltzing off to Sant’Elmo. Once more the parents asked the grandmother to step out onto the balcony, and Barbara allowed herself to bark a bit. Yet all she and Jay got for their efforts was another wild pixel chase through the Lulucita pages on the ‘net. She wound up reading not only the saint-of-fire business again, but also a number of messages she hadn’t picked up before. JJ and Chris knew where all the secrets were, a link that played a song about the Camorra, and another that called up a movie clip, or was it two clips? One moment you saw Jack Lemmon and Sophia Loren, the next Lemmon and Mastroanni. The two teenagers knew about them all, and they argued that every piece of input, in every format, was intended as a message for the family. Every word was meant for Jay and Barb and the kids. Whenever the people who’d followed Paul’s story got together to chat, not a line of agate type went by without some private high sign to the Lulucitas, a compliment or a warning or a nudge. Every posting was intended to close the gap between the person at the keyboard and the American santa famiglia, a wireless laying-on of hands.
“It’s like,” JJ said, “say we’re the Talking Heads. I mean, we’re one of the guys who used to be the Talking Heads. Say, then we visit a Talking Heads site. Hey, everybody on the site believes he’s our best friend. Everybody’s the Unknown Head.”
“Everybody thinks,” Chris said, “they’ve got some special private connection to us. Like, they’re saying their prayers, and they believe we’re listening.”
“Yeah. Like when Nerdly here prays to the girls from Victoria’s Secret.”
Jay glowered; he wouldn’t let them get started. Barbara, meantime, understood that what her sons had shown her in no way constituted a straight answer.
“All right,” Chris said, “think of it like — what Paul said earlier about staying in Naples. There’s a lot going on. There’s a whole lot out there.”
“A lot. And Chris and me, all of us, we’re just this one small part.”
The boys’ line of talk fell well short of convincing Barbara, they didn’t change how she read the message on the site or the trip to Sant’Elmo, but they did leave her impressed. John Junior especially, showing backbone and maturity. Before Naples, before so challenging a girlfriend (if you could call Romy a girlfriend), he would’ve told Mom and Pop everything. He couldn’t have stood up to their grilling. And both these teenagers, Barb had to admit, had learned to handle their parents a lot better than even so recently as during their Memorial Day excursion to Mystic seaport. The boys had figured out that today Mom and Pop would back off — without admitting anything of the sort, to be sure — so long as they could tell there’d been nothing too serious about the tryst at Sant’Elmo. The ‘rents just needed some assurance that the get-together had been quick, clean, and free of burdensome consequences. And that’s as much as they got, Jay and Barb: they could see that whatever had happened in the castle, it hadn’t left a mark. JJ and his girl hadn’t even found a place to lie down.
What Mom and Pop needed, in effect, was to post their own message, on their carefully encrypted site. Good parents, that was the message. We’re good parents.
“Yeah, think of Paul,” JJ said, following his brother’s lead. “He’s feeling pretty cooped up around here too. And then, I mean, his episodes.”
“He’s acting out,” Chris put in. “Like, with the onset of puberty, the hormone thing. It’s got to be some form of acting out”
“Hey, Paul wasn’t a saint to start with. Our brother was a normal young American. And you guys are good parents, you can see.”
“It’s Hormones 101. JJ and me, we’ve got to get him out, do something normal.”
The boys were getting so shrewd, they were practically Neapolitan.
“It could’ve been a lot worse, hey? All he’s been through.”
“Could’ve been a lot worse, and crazy. Like, when you think of some of the old saint stuff. The stigmata, the visions. Could’ve been hormones, you think.”
The onus fell back on Barb and Jay — how much did they need to know? How ugly did they want the evening to get? Chris shut down the browser, so the family’s Christmas-shot screen saver replaced the site’s tormented pictography, and the mother moved to the balcony doors. Vesuvius had stained the sunset a sallow white, like a t-shirt handed down from brother to brother.
Then the door slid open. The mother-in-law stood before her, smiling and half naked. She’d recognized the end of private time.
Aurora was forever nearby, just off-screen. Barbara could see the old woman in the very face of the grandson who might now be planning something dubious with his gypsy girlfriend. Jay’s mother was the Irish one in the family, the one who’d gifted her first grandchild with puckish black eyes and laugh-ready dimples. She was a beauty, Aurora. At seventy-something her build remained catlike and her wrinkles suited the shape of her face. She’d helped herself to a bit of cosmetic surgery, to be sure, and she freely owned up to these “repairs.” Also her long widowhood had included seminars on wardrobe and yoga and toners and proteins. Barbara’s notions of old Italian women, of crones in black with faces like bark — the kind of aging she imagined for her own mother — these were the opposite of Aurora. Jay’s mother even knew which events showed her off to best advantage. She was a familiar face at high-profile benefits around New York, dolling herself up for the sake of homeless shelters or free medical clinics. Two or three times, when her dress or her companion had been right, Aurora’s picture had run in the Times Sunday Styles. Even the two-piece she wore out on the Vomero balcony provided a camera-friendly complement to her hair, a richly flowing red. Silky.