Chris was nodding along, but he preferred to keep the emphasis on the documentary. He pointed out how useless and “touristy” he and his older brother would start to feel if their project was limited to just the two of them. “I mean, at that clinic downtown, what can we do, really? Take out the trash?”
And John Junior assured the parents that they wouldn’t need Paul everyday. Chris had “storyboards,” JJ explained. The boards laid it all out, the whole narrative to date, and Paul would only have to tag along for a couple of “sequences.” Also the oldest was smart enough to bring up, yet again, the change in local attitudes now that the Lulucitas were rid of their former liaison officer. “These days,” JJ said, “hey. Everywhere we go in this city, there’s an angel looking out for us.”
Barbara was trying to see past his sweet-faced Irish blarney. But the Jaybird beside her knew the way she was leaning. The husband heaved a sigh, okay okay, and asked if the boys had a figure, “ballpark,” for what this stuff would cost.
“I know this,” Chris said. “With the situation we’ve got here, the PX discounts, we can forget about the sticker price.”
“Figure back in New York,” JJ said, “the best deal on the street. Then take off another, hmm, twenty percent.”
Jay couldn’t be sure what Roebuck would be willing to do for him. There were a lot of Americans over here…
“Hey,” JJ said. “Aren’t we still Americans?”
“Pop,” Chris said. “Haven’t you heard what I’ve been saying? This project, it’s something for any American. We all want to return to home ground.”
Barbara used to be the one pulling the strings around here. Straightening the front of her dress, she suggested that the boys might not need so much high-tech equipment. Didn’t Chris keep saying this was all a myth? Maybe he would be better off trying to write a novel.…
The younger boy was shaking his head. Had Mom even been listening? What good would it do to write a novel? “In the first place, everybody knows how to write a novel by like, age ten. JJ and me, we need to learn something. Like, to get somewhere.”
“Word,” said John Junior.
And in the second place, the younger brother went on, their project involved real outreach; “it’s big, Mom.” It wasn’t about one person sitting alone writing, and then one other person sitting alone reading.
Again the mother heard the nick of authentic ambition, in the boy. She figured JJ had something similar working at his nervous system, the rough grain of desire for a greater impact from his “on-location footage,” a greater reward than sneaking another kiss or two. Barbara shared a different sort of look with Jay, the okay-look. The husband was perhaps the lone remaining family member who still would wait for her approval. And even after as the Jaybird turned back to the boys, admitting for starters that he’d been thinking they could use a laptop, Barb sat thinking it over.
“One day at a time,” Jay was saying. “This is on a provisional basis.”
The boys weren’t about to quibble. Looking very young all of a sudden, they erupted in a loud high-five. With that the mother sat up formally and made another stipulation. Barbara insisted that, on the days when Paul joined them on the shoots, Dora and Syl would have to go along too.
“Uhh,” John Junior said.
“You said this was about everybody taking part,” Barbara said.
What else can a mother do, when her children go through the change? What option did she have except another touch of underhandedness, using the boys’ new freedom against them? While her seventeen-year-old had been developing additional clout around the home, he must’ve also been brought up short by the dawning sense of what he owed his brothers and sisters. Dawning complication and guilt — Barbara knew all about it. And these days, if the younger sibs were around, the oldest would rein in whatever else he might be up to. If the sibs were on hand (plus some of the new security team), and if the police too cruised the shoot (the cops would be given the boys’ schedule), that should keep any clandestine make out sessions from going too far (and also put the kibosh on any other illegal activity).
All this had come to mind in the time it took the boys to raise their spread hands and slap them together. Anyway, what else could Barbara do?
Also she handled the call to Roebuck. If the mother was still working the angles, still speaking in codes, she might as well use them on an Alpha. With no more than a well-placed silence or two, the next morning she scored a laptop of the coming generation. Chris and JJ got fifty-hour batteries, beefed-up wireless reach, and well-nigh bottomless storage, plus a couple of scan-disk sticks as a throw-in. The software came straight out of Industrial Light & Magic. On top of that, the boys had the stuff in their hands by lunchtime. It arrived in a fortified Hummer, maybe one of Kahlberg’s old vehicles, and the brothers had the driver wait in the piazza while they whipped through their installations.
Naturally Barbara tried talking to her priest. A couple of days later, in the kitchen with the old man, she had to ask: “Is that all this is? You know what I’m saying?”
Cesare met her look, something he hadn’t done much since he’d arrived.
“Think about it, Father. Cesare. This family goes through six time zones, three miracles, three thousand years of history, and one walloping, super-size self-delusion. That’s the short list, you know? But then, what’s the big diff? I lose a little and the kids gain a little. Is that all this is, the same as would’ve happened anyway?”
The priest was barely with it. He made a faltering mention of things she couldn’t have expected to happen, like living with twenty-four hour security.
“But even that — today when the boys went out, all they had was the driver.”
“Well, one can see the logic in that. There’s little threat of kidnap.”
“So it’s just like I’m saying. We might as well be back in Bridgeport.”
His crumpled eyelids drooped again, and he glanced away again, looking out the kitchen door. The man might’ve been some fleshy-faced animal, sniffing round an unfamiliar space. Between them she had out the garlic and onion, the cans of crushed tomatoes and tomato paste.
“I was thinking, signora.” Now he was addressing the crimson show-biz lettering across the larger can. “About your boy’s idea for his film, don’t you know. I was thinking about the wanderer’s return, to the — the home ground.”
Barbara began with the garlic. If the old man wasn’t going to pay attention, she didn’t want to be working on the onion and maybe breaking into tears.
“What your boy seems to be up to, it strikes me as peculiarly Italian. Italian-American, I would say. The very idea of ‘home ground,’ don’t you know, of keeping the old country close. As if a person needed to take communion at the ancestors’ table.”
“Cesare.” Barbara left off peeling the first clove. “Did you bring the handout for this lecture?”
“I do realize, it’s irresponsible to generalize.” The way that beak of his shifted directions, the priest looked like he was trying to screen out the makings for the sauce, to catch a subtler scent. “But I must say, I’ve seen it a good deal of this by now. Seen my share of the families, asking how they might find where nonna was born. Or they tiptoe into the rectory and request all the birth records between 1914 and 1921.”
“Huh. Do you remember what happened when I had a chance to visit where my mother came from?”
“It’s got me thinking, don’t you know. Do immigrants from the Punjab need this sort of thing? Some nan out of the old ovens? Or let us say some transplanted Dubliner, some man now happily producing memorial videos for a mortuary in Texas…”