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ISSUE 1 December 2000 MILKWOOD REVIEW

OTHER WORK: "A POET'S VISIT"

WINDOW TO THE PAST, cont.

She had come from a mixed religious background-- her father was a Presbyterian and her mother Jewish, so to her Mario's religion was not an issue but she could see it did matter to him, or at least it was important to him to please his family who were all Catholics. They would have their wedding in the garden of his family's house with tables and chairs set under grape arbors, he said.
It seemed she had considered the idea of going there but finally decided against it and not just because she was reluctant to convert. Among the letters, she came across one from her mother to him that looked like a draft of what she had mailed since it had no signature at the bottom and some of the words were crossed off. It said:

"My love, Mario,

I know I'm going to regret my decision not to join you in Olina. I wish I had the courage to follow what my heartbeats say rather than be dominated by practical calculations. But I can't stop envisioning our love turning bitter in a place where I would remain an outsider with no life of my own, apart from yours. I hope you'll come back here and finish college and then after that we'll decide what we want to do. We are both so young. Meanwhile I live for your letters and your voice on the phone. And I feel I'm with you from the wonderful vivid descriptions in your letters. I can see the mountains with sheep and goats grazing on them, hear the jingling of the bells hanging from their necks. The shepherds with weather-beaten faces, the olive trees, with their leaves darkening as the dusk approaches. Every night I wrap myself in the robe you sent to me. I want you with me, all of you..."

After reading the letters Roberta kept thinking of Edmund. She wondered if her mother had regretted her decision not to go to Olina. Her advice to Roberta, through her ups and downs with boys, had always been, "You should follow your heart."
She searched for a photograph of Edmund in all the albums she had saved over the years but she could not find any. She must have lost an album in the move from Brooklyn. She had gone out with Edmund when they were both in high school in Brooklyn, before she had moved with her parents to Stony Brook. In classes they often sat next to each other. "Can you read that word?" "Do you have an extra pen?" "Where is the Aegean Sea?" He asked her as many questions as she asked him. When they ran into each other in the halls or the street he would stop and talk to her. One afternoon she was walking home in heavy rain, barely protected by her umbrella, and he appeared on the street, driving a station wagon and offered her a ride. After that they began to go out. He told her jokes, funny anecdotes about people he met in his father's pizza parlor where he worked on weekends. His speech was accented and sometimes ungrammatical. He had been born in America but his parents spoke only Italian at home. His voice trailed off at the end of a sentence to almost inaudibility. His mother, she found out later, barely spoke English although she had come to this country when she was sixteen. His father, like Edmund, spoke in accented English.
Their house, she remembered, was old, shabby, yet it breathed with life. His mother had a plain style about her, her hair pulled back in a bun, her clothes loose and shapeless, that made her seem more like a kindly grandmother than mother. She spent a lot of time in the kitchen, baking cakes and cookies, which she would serve to them warm. Edmund's five younger sisters and brothers created unceasing background activities and sounds. Religious items-- statues of the Virgin Mary, crosses-- were set on side tables and hung on walls, but their oppressive presence was counteracted by numerous plants and pets--gerbils, parakeets, dogs, cats, fish. Edmund's own room, every inch of the floor and walls, were taken by various items. Stacks of records lay on the floor. A tank filled with fish stood by the window, posters of foreign counties, maps, hung on the walls.
When with him she felt utterly at ease and secure and yet she wasn't sure if he was ideal for her. For one thing, he was not ambitious-- all he wanted was to work with his father in his pizza parlor right after graduating from high school, get married and have children. She was relieved that she could make a break with him when her parents announced to her that they had to move to Long Island for her father's job.
She told Edmund then, "We should date other people, we'll be living too far apart."
But for months, after they separated, she had pangs of longing for him. He never called. She broke down a few times and called him but it was hard to put back the shattered pieces.
It was reading the letters that had compelled her to call Edmund. Why not, she had thought. Maybe he has not met anyone that held him.
Now as she walked towards the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, she could see him waiting for her on the spot they had agreed on. As she reached him, he stretched out his arms for her and she moved right into them. He said, "Roberta," with such familiarity that it was as if it were yesterday they had talked, not twelve years ago.
"This is so incredible," she said.
"I knew it would happen. I was waiting for you." It was so much like him to talk like that.
Other than looking a little older he was the same as she remembered him and he did resemble pictures of Mario, her mother's Sardinian boy friend. His manner and way of speaking were the same she recalled from long ago too. It was as if he were someone she had dreamed about and then he had come before her in flesh.
They began to stroll on the promenade, the way they used to as teenagers. A mist was hanging in the air and sunlight filtering through it was cool with a lemony color. They filled in each other with what had been going on in their lives all these years. He had been married for a brief time and then divorced. He had no children. He had taken over his father's pizza parlor after he passed away, then he had opened several others on his own. Now he mainly worked in an office, managing the stores. He lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. Roberta told him about her parents, about how none of her relationships had worked out well enough to lead to marriage. As they talked she realized how much they had in common, that they had similar reactions to many things. They liked to walk by the water (he in Brooklyn, she in Stony Brook) early in the morning, before they left for work, and watch the sun cut through the mist over the water, seagulls dive into the sand. They both liked listening to old songs that evoked their adolescence. He always met her eyes as they talked
"We were waiting for each other," he said at one point, his face glowing with warmth.
At the end of that date, which lasted until dawn, with them going to a restaurant and then to his apartment, he said, "I'm never going to let you go now that I've found you again."
"I don't want to lose you," she said and she knew she meant it.
I certainly am not being self-destructive to love Edmund, she thought, weeks later. She could feel her mother nodding in approval of the relationship. Sometimes in a fantasy state Edmund merged with Mario, the boy her mother had loved. Then the landscape around her would change into the one in Olina, with sheep grazing on the hills, the Shepherds attending to them, olive groves everywhere as Mario had described in his letters and her mother had referred to in hers. In her picture of the future she and Edmund would live in this house and then one day they would go and visit Olina.

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