A lucky woman, she was, and getting the most out of a long widowhood. Jay’s father had suffered a freak accident for which some of the wealthiest people on earth were liable. Paul Lulucita (Jay had put off passing along the name) had strayed into a mid-Manhattan movie set, some epic about a monster loose in the city. The director had loved the look of broken power lines showering sparks over standing water. So young Jay had been gifted with an exceptional trust fund, Hollywood blood-money, and even from overseas Barbara had made sure to check the remaining investments. The retirement account had grown nicely, and it looked like they wouldn’t have to worry about the college fund any more either — not since they accepted the offer from Roebuck. More than that, some years ago now the wife had grasped the emotional impact of Jay’s tragedy, the way the sudden loss of his Dad had helped prompt the son into marriage at an earlier age than might’ve been wise. Barb understood even, thanks to the Samaritan Center, how her husband’s vaporized father matched up with her own runaway mother. The absent parents provided a relationship balance, a set of ghost parallel bars.
Or you could put it another way: you could say the relationship had been trouble from Day One. Trouble was where Aurora came in. The death of her husband had scarred her differently, very, from how it had marked her son. In the widow’s case, flirtation had been raised to the level of a credo: I seduce, therefore I am. So long as I remain more flesh than bone, I’ll go on seeking fleshy pleasures. Barb recalled when they’d first met, a high-breasted Barbara Cantasola shaking hands with the mother of her hard-bellied new boyfriend. This had been barely a year after the accident, and already the widow had a man at the kitchen table, his head slick with Grecian Formula, looking over a brochure for a spa in midtown. The movie studio responsible for her husband’s death had abandoned its project, but Aurora had no qualms about stepping in where they’d left off, the monster loose in the city. Nor was the mother shamed by her son’s quick retrenchment in family life. As an in-law, too, she flaunted her “capering.” She’d shown up at Barbara’s house with men-friends as young as thirty-three (granted, no one saw his I.D.) and as old as something close to eighty. Her one rule for the children was that she never be called “Grandma.” If the kids didn’t forget she would delight them with gifts for their saints’ days, or for Easter or Pentecost or Advent or Epiphany. It might’ve been the woman’s idea of yin and yang, getting lots of men and giving lots of toys.
During every visit, Barbara would study that weekend’s date. In the man’s eyes, she always saw the same questions: This isn’t going to get much crazier, is it? It isn’t going to get much scarier? Not much, brother. The affairs never lasted. The men would slingshot around the grandmother for a month or two, then whistle away with their tails on fire. And here on this side of the Atlantic the air-time wasn’t likely to get any less turbulent. Aurora had arrived for the visit without a boy-toy, and Barbara would bet — what? the cost of a remodel for Roebuck’s office? — she would just bet that her mother-in-law was going to score some local talent. The woman claimed she lived in Greenwich Village because she found it “romantic,” and Naples might’ve been the city that had given Greenwich Village the idea. Her most likely victim in town, in fact, began to seem obvious by the fourth or fifth day after the grandmother’s arrival. Dottore DiPio, sure. The doctor was a bit of a dandy himself, and during these housebound days, his beard-plucking grew ever more agitated around the grandmother.
When Aurora spoke to the priest, on the other hand, the man went quiet. He stopped shuffling his knobby joints. Barbara assumed the old playgirl offended him, but when she asked Cesare about her in-law, she didn’t like his answers.
“Our Savior,” he said, “condemns hypocrisy. The whited sepulcher, don’t you know, that hides our rot. But your Aurora accepts her decay. She honors it.”
Barb figured Cesare was impressed by the widow’s charities. Barb had told him how, at the Samaritan Center, the donors’ plaque listed Jay’s mother as an “Angel.”
“She’ll be useful to you,” the priest went on. “Italians respect a woman like Aurora. With her around, they’ll tend more to steer clear.”
Barbara had noticed as much already. When she did get out, these days, she experienced the same falloff in local attentions as John Junior. The day Jay began his duties at DiPio’s downtown clinic, she took everyone else back to the sports facility, the soccer field. Everyone, including Aurora and the security. But this time, there and back, even Paulo miracolo went pretty much un-harassed. The boy was asked to bless a saint’s medallion or two, naturally, and Barbara as well. Also the group had another clandestino keeping an eye on them, trailing the crew for a few blocks, while never daring to approach, to panhandle. But the guy was another harmless stick of a sub-Saharan. He disappeared as soon as Barb pointed him out to one of the security. The only significant interruption, really, came from the energetic Maddalena.
The celebrity girlfriend no longer needed to carry a camera, but that day she’d settled in with the other media, behind the sawhorses in the piazza. She stuck around, too, after Jay hiked off to the funiculare and the clinic downtown. By the time Barbara and the others appeared on the stoop, Maddalena might’ve been the only journalist waiting. Then she hurdled the sawhorse, with an eye-catching flip of her tight-jeaned legs. The security didn’t faze the girl. Two of the squad had to brace Maddalena in a way that made Barbara think of the scene out in the tent-chapel at the Refugee Center. But even then the young woman kept asking, just this side of screaming, that Paul meet with her boyfriend Fond. Ten minutes was all the former hunger striker asked for, ten minutes.
One of the men from Interpol reached under his lapel, but the mother put out a hand. There’d been enough of that.
Maddalena didn’t fail to notice. “Signora,” she cried, “you know my Fondo! You know he has good heart!”
JJ bent towards his mother’s ear. “I’m so sure,” he said, “this girl knows all about a good heart. That’s why she was in such a rush to get her face on the news.”
“He will give you new meaning!” Maddalena called, as the family started away. “Your prayers and your miracles, they will have new meaning! A new life!”
But to judge from the rest of the excursion, free of stop and go and hassle that had always been part of the package with Kahlberg, the Lulucitas already had a new life. The pretty reporter and her Hermit Crab contact were behind the curve. Rather Barb now had to figure out where, in this renewal, could she fit all her old guilt? Whoever she’d become here in Naples, a good witch who guided her family to the greater truth or a banshee who wailed the end of everything — whoever, she wasn’t the woman she’d been before these lengthening June days, in this reeking city layered like the decades of a rosary, or like a long marriage.
And Aurora, new in town, was something else again. The priest wasn’t alone in saying that the septuagenarian prankster, always ready for a quick game of cards or Monopoly, Nerf-ball or birds-&-ponies, did the kids some good. She offered a healthy alternative, after a month when their Mama had come across as ever more fire-&-brimstone. Dr. DiPio had told Barbara the same. Of course the old medico was already under Aurora’s spell, the black widow had put him on the menu, but when it came to the children he could still be trusted. He’d fingered his Christopher medal and claimed that the grandmother “increased total sympathy levels.” Nor could Barb fail to notice that, with the mother-in-law around, everyone under twenty-one acted more goofball and agreeable. A couple of times the kids even mounted impromptu performances on the balcony, doing their bit for whoever might still have a camera, down in the piazza. They pretended to be a rock band, and Paul was the surprise star of the performance. The middle child threw in loose-hipped dance moves while his brothers wailed away on air guitar, rather Broadway in his black and white, almost like that choreographer with the Italian name — was it Fosse?