“Look, I know this feels like a long shot, but if you do what you say you can do, you have as good a chance as anyone to get the job.”
“That’s all we need, Ms. Lewis.” I stand and extend my hand to her. Gram rises and does the same. “A chance. We’ll show you how it’s done.”
After our meeting with Rhedd Lewis, I sent Gram home to Perry Street in a cab, while I took the crosstown bus over to Sloan-Kettering to meet Mom. I BlackBerried my sisters with a cc to Alfred about the Rhedd Lewis meeting, telling them of the competition. Tess is good for a novena (we really need the prayers now), Jaclyn will be supportive, and the cc to Alfred was to show him that I do have a vision about the future of the company. I included a snapshot of Gram in front of the store for Mom, who likes a visual with her news.
The sliding doors of the hospital open as I approach. Once inside, I see my mother sitting on a couch by the windows facing a sunlit sculpture garden, typing on her BlackBerry like a wild game of Where Is Thumpkin. Her sunglasses are perched on her head like a tiara, and she is dressed from head to foot in baby blue, with a wide swath of beige cashmere thrown across her chest like a flag.
“I’m here, Mom.”
“Valentine!” She stands and embraces me. “I’m so happy when it’s your shift.” Mom has decided, that instead of all of us showing up for every single one of Dad’s appointments, she would put her children on rotation so we wouldn’t burn out. Of course, she is in attendance at every poke, prod, and MRI.
My mother has never suffered from burnout, nor does she shy away from a project before it’s completed. I never saw her energy flag when it came to her family; she was and is eternally peppy, whether it was French-braiding three little girls’ hair before school, negotiating through the mayhem of the holidays, or pouring concrete to form a new front walkway, she is up for anything. These days, it’s getting my father well.
“I loved the picture. How did it go at Bergdorf’s?”
“We’re entering a competition to design a pair of shoes to win the holiday windows for Christmas 2008.”
“Fabulous! What a coup!”
“It’s a long way to winning, Ma. We’ll see what happens.” It doesn’t even dawn on my mother that we might not win. Another reason to love her. “So, how’s Dad?”
“Oh, it’s just boring test day. They’re going to put the seeds in after Gram’s birthday.”
Mom and I sit down. Instinctively, I put my head on her shoulder. Her skin has the scent of white roses and white chocolate. Her hoop earrings rest against my cheek as she talks. “He’s going to be fine.”
“I know,” I tell her. But I really don’t know.
“We stay positive and we pray. That’ll do the trick.”
I love that Mom thinks cancer is a trick that can be turned at will with a smile and a Hail Mary. When I lie in bed and think about my father and the future, I think of his grandchildren, and how, at the rate I’m going, he’ll never meet my children. Sometimes I swear Mom can read my thoughts, and she asks, “How’s it going with the fella you’re seeing?”
I lift my head off her shoulder. “He’s tall.”
“Excellent.” My mother nods her head slowly. In the pantheon of male attributes, my mother admires tall above full pockets or a full head of hair. “Handsome?”
“I’d say so.”
“That’s wonderful. Dad said he’s a chef. I love that name, Roman Falconi. Sexy.”
“He owns his own restaurant down in Little Italy.”
“Oh, I’d love a chef in the family. Maybe he could teach me how to make those fancy foams they’re doing at Per Se. I read about them in Food and Wine. Imagine the infusion of new ideas!”
“He’s got a lot of those.”
“When is the unveiling?” Mom asks.
“I’m bringing him to Gram’s birthday party at the Carlyle.”
“Perfect. Neutral ground. Well, my only advice in general is to take it easy. Don’t force it.” My mother bites her lip.
“I won’t.”
“I only hope you find the abiding happiness I have with my Dutch. Your father and I are nuts about each other, you know.”
“I know.”
“We’ve had our troubles, God knows, all kinds of storms and rough waters on high seas. But somehow, we rode through it all and made it back to shore. Sometimes we even crawled, but we made it back.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I can say that we prevailed.”
“You did.”
“And, you know? That’s what it’s all about. A great philosopher said, something like, you know I can never remember jokes or the exact words of philosophers, but basically, he said that love is what you’ve been through together.”
“It was James Thurber. The American humorist and author.” Sometimes my BA in English comes in handy.
“Well, whoever. My point is, it seems to me we keep going through it.”
“You do, Mom.”
“Your father wasn’t a saint. But I’m not the Blessed Mother either, am I?”
“I think you have more jewelry.”
“True.” She laughs. “But I know he never wanted to hurt me, or you children. He just lost his mind for a while. Men go through their own version of the change in their forties, and your father was no exception.”
“Roman is forty-one.”
“Maybe he went through it last year, before you met him,” Mom says brightly.
“We can hope.”
Mom goes into her purse; when she snaps it open, a clean whoosh of peppermint and sweet jasmine fill the air. Sticking out of the pocket where the cell phone goes is a clump of perfume testers from the Estée Lauder counter. That’s another of Mom’s elegant-living tricks, she tucks paper bookmark perfume samplers in lingerie drawers, evening bags, purses, and car vents, wherever ambience is needed, and evidently, in my mother’s view, you need ambience everywhere.
She finds the tinfoil sleeve of gum among the cancer pamphlets, punches a red square, hands it to me, then pops one in her own mouth. We sit and chew.
“Mom, how did you know you could get Dad back after the…incident?”
“I didn’t do a thing.”
“Sure you did.”
“No, really, I just left him alone. The worst punishment you can give a man is to isolate him. I’ve never seen one who can handle it. Look at what being alone did to our priests. Of course, that’s another subject entirely.”
“I remember when you and Dad fell in love again.”
“We were lucky, we got it back. Most people don’t.”
“How did you do it?”
“I had to do what a single girl in your position has to do when she likes a guy. Never mind that I had four children and a college degree collecting dust. I had to make myself desirable again. That meant I had to show my best self to him at all times. I had to figure him out all over again. I had to redo the world we lived in, including the house and my wardrobe. But mostly, I had to be sincere. I couldn’t stay with him for you, or for my mother, or for my religion, I had to stay with him because I wanted to.”
“So how did you know when you had succeeded?”
“One day, your father came home with a bag of groceries from D’Agostino’s. You kids were at school. It was a few weeks after we got back together. Big week. First week of school…”
“September 1986. I was in the sixth grade.”
“Right. Anyway, he comes into the kitchen. And I was sitting there, filling out some form for one of you kids for school and he opens the fridge and unloads food into it. And then he lights up the burner on the stove and puts a big pot of water on the flame. Then he gets out a saucepan and starts cooking. He’s chopping onions, peeling garlic, browning meat, and adding tomatoes and spices and all. After a while, I said, ‘Dutch, what are you doing?’ He said, ‘I’m making dinner. I thought lasagna would be good.’ And I said, ‘Great.’”