The Women of Saturn Read online

  From the age of fifteen until my early twenties, my paesani had considered me a good catch; I had been courted by a string of young men. I had turned them all down. “You never get attached to anyone,” my mother complained.

  She had no other way of explaining my refusal to have anything to do with the succession of serious young men with yearning eyes and tender hearts who wanted to do things properly, with the respect due such a well-regarded family. They followed customs, and sent relatives to our house as go-betweens, making it clear that marriage was their only goal.

  “They put the cart before the horse,” I complained to Mother, who didn’t understand what the problem was.

  “Isn’t it better to deal with someone who is serious about marriage, and not only thinking of joking around?” she’d say.

  “What if I don’t like him? How can I pull back after the whole family has been involved?” I refused every offer. I especially spurned men who seemed to have all the right qualities for good potential husbands: I could see my future too perfectly mapped out in their eyes. What would they make of my quirks and whims? I might as well have taken my childhood dreams, sealed them in the green trunk we had brought with us, and dropped it into the ocean.

  Word got around that I was difficult, and after a while no one approached the family.

  There is no corresponding word in Italian for dating, a North American institution I missed out on as a teen. In high school, I hadn’t been allowed to go to school dances, let alone be picked up at home by a boy to go out for the evening.

  At twenty-five, I felt awkward around men, especially those to whom I felt most attracted. I often asked myself what a girl in a large city needed to do to meet an interesting man, short of advertising oneself in the classifieds or, worse still, parading one’s wares in the meat markets of discos and bars. Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar confirmed my distaste for the smoky nightclub scene.

  Sean’s courtship turned out to be anything but conventional. We were both swept up by the enthusiasm of our first teaching job at WLHS. Ours was a young staff and the school offered such a variety of activities for teachers as well as students that I felt like the high school teen I had never had the chance to be. After the first month, Sean and a group of senior students recruited me to help out in the production of the musical, My Fair Lady. It didn’t take much effort to convince me to coordinate it, especially since I saw it as a project tailor-made for my hairdressing class to practice elaborate period hairstyles.

  Because I had a car and Sean didn’t, I found myself doing most of the tedious work of driving around the city, finding and then carting furniture for props for the stage sets. After the Christmas holidays, the two of us spent more and more time together after school, and Sean often ended up having dinner at my house. He lived with two roommates in a basement apartment in the McGill ghetto, and ate out most evenings. I lived with my mother in the same apartment I live in now.

  Mother tried hard to get used to the idea of me bringing home a male friend. “He’s just a friend,” she would tell her relatives with a shrug, “Do you understand anything?”

  One Sunday, Sean and I spent the afternoon at his place, finalizing the odds and ends of the show that would be taking place the following Saturday. His two roommates were out, and, for once, his apartment was quiet. It was a warm day. I wore a summer T-shirt and a long, loose gauze skirt. We had snacked on cheese and bread, and drank a bottle of red wine, which made me feel sleepy. I wasn’t accustomed to drinking more than half a glass. I lay down on Sean’s bed to rest before going home.

  Sean put on a Leonard Cohen album, and lay next to me. I kept my eyes closed. The whispery monotone of the poet’s voice and melancholic tone of the song about Suzanne taking him down to the river had me practically dozing, when Sean turned around and put his face on my chest. I felt a sudden rush to embrace him, but all I could do was stroke his hair. He caressed my breasts, and I was overwhelmed by the desire to offer them to him. I waited for him to lift the T-shirt, remove one breast from the bra cup and kiss it greedily. His other hand moved up my bare legs. I hadn’t expected anything to happen, but it felt natural, and I didn’t object. There was no piercing pain, no outbursts of joy, only a mellow, drowsy sensation of pleasure. It was as if I had fallen asleep on the beach at the end of a sun-drenched day, lulled by the repetitive sounds of the rise and fall of the ocean, then jolted slightly by the soft shifting of the wet sand.

  “You’re soft and cuddly,” Sean said, snuggling against my back. Maybe it was the warmth from the red wine; my cheeks felt flushed, as if caressed by the setting sun.

  During the next week, the details of the last-minute preparation for the production took over all our energies and conversations. The show was a great success. Sean welcomed all the special guests, including J.P., who because of his friendship with Sean, had come as a representative of the local MP, Alex Di Principe.

  In June, Sean and I attended the school’s first graduation dance as a couple. I, who had never attended a prom dance before, was as excited about it as my sixteen-year-old students. By the end of summer the two of us were spending our free time together, our relationship smoothly and effortlessly slipping from being colleagues to friends to lovers. The differences in our upbringing and lifestyle didn’t seem to matter. When I was with Sean, I was so engrossed with the present that, for once, my past was forgotten. When I asked Sean how he felt about being with someone of a different culture, he quoted John Lennon. We should imagine ourselves to be people “with no country and no religion too … living for today.”

  Sean never spoke much about his family, except to tell me that his mother had left home when he was three. He was raised by his father, who remarried soon after his mother’s departure. While in high school, Sean was shifted to his paternal grandparents’ home because he didn’t get along with his stepmother. After high school, he left Winnipeg for Saskatoon, and moved east. He lived in Toronto, then Ottawa. There, he met J.P., obtained a degree in English Literature, and started a Master’s Program in Philosophy. He moved to Montreal and, through J.P.’s connections, got a teaching job at WLHS. His birth mother had reconnected with him; he spoke to her on the phone from time to time. He seemed to hold no rancour toward her. I especially liked that Sean’s mood was always even. No heavy, dark clouds rested over his head. Around him, I felt weightless.

  By the start of the new school year, Sean and I had started talking about getting married the following summer. Sean didn’t believe in the conventional rites of engagement and marriage, especially as practised by my Italian friends. We spoke of a possible marriage as one of the many things we would do together, much like travelling to Europe on a Eurail pass, staying in youth hostels, or backpacking and camping our way across Canada.

  The summer passed. Our marriage and travelling plans were put on hold. Sean became preoccupied with his dwindling career prospects in education. At J.P.’s insistence, he joined the youth wing of the Liberal party. I registered at Concordia University to continue my studies in Italian literature that I had started years before. Sean often accompanied me to family gatherings, but the topic of marriage was only raised by my relatives.

  “They’re in no rush,” Mother said to them. “They want to finish their studies.”

  My relatives have pampered Sean. He has enjoyed their attention, their sharing of traditional foods, and especially watching my uncles make wine in the fall and sausages in the winter. But he’s not as keen to fulfill all the doveri—the family obligations—that are part and parcel of belonging to a close-knit Italian family. My family excuses Sean for his flightiness with the usual, “He’s English.”

  Another summer came and went. Sean spent more and more time volunteering for Di Principe’s riding associations. When J.P. was promoted to work in Ottawa as a party strategist, Sean had been eased into J.P.’s position as Principe’s aide, and left WLHS.

  That year,
one day in late October, Tina’s husband, Gaetano, offered me some books. Gaetano lived on the lower floor of a duplex on Trenholme Street in NDG. The top floor had been occupied by a professor from Loyola College, who disappeared without notice, and with three months’ rent unpaid. He left behind his worn-out furniture and, in his living room, wall-to-wall shelves of books on theology, philosophy, literature, history, psychology, and other scholarly subjects that Sean found impressive. Sean and I fell in love with the homey place and with the street, which, at that time of year, was resplendent with fall foliage.

  “Take whatever you want,” Gaetano told me. “What you don’t want, I’ll put into the garbage. The whole place smells, and I’ll have to fumigate it before putting it up for rent.”

  “Don’t throw anything out,” I said. “I’ll take all the books.” That evening we talked about the value of the books and of the semi-antique furniture.

  “I’d love to live in that duplex,” Sean said. “Maybe we can rent it and just move in, as is.”

  “We move in?” I asked, incredulous that he still hadn’t understood the impossibility for an Italian girl like me of living with a man without being married.

  “Why not? It’s too good an opportunity to let slip. I’m spending less and less time in my apartment anyway. Why pay the extra rent?”

  “Because I don’t think it would go over well with my mother,” I said, and then added, as an afterthought: “What happened to our marriage plans?”

  “How will a church ceremony and a piece of paper change how we feel about each other? Living together is commitment enough.”

  I regretted having asked the question. I felt as if I was proposing to him. If it weren’t for my family, I would have liked living with him for a while.

  As I had expected, both Mother and Luigi thought I had lost my mind to even consider it. “Are you crazy?” Mother said. “We’re not English. Maybe it’s okay for him, but not for us. If he doesn’t want to get married, tell him to find someone else to live with him.”

  “He’s afraid of the commitment. It’s understandable. Look at his family history,” Luigi said, and tried to convince me to, at least, compromise with a civil wedding. “Just for the sake of the family and the paesani. You know how they’ll talk.”

  “I don’t care about the paesani,” I insisted.

  “Don’t be so hardheaded and selfish,” Luigi told me. “Think of Mother and what it will do to her.”

  Mother had already accepted the fact that Sean and I wouldn’t marry in a Catholic church. Sean is a non-practicing Anglican, and I’m a Catholic, who only attends Mass at Christmas and Easter. In practical and philosophical terms, our different religions didn’t pose a problem. Sean agreed that, on principle, a civil wedding would be fair … when the time was right.

  Once the topic of moving in before marriage was brought to the table, it didn’t seem like such a taboo subject anymore. I had grown to passionately dislike the elaborate and tacky Italian weddings that I was forced to attend with my family. For once I took a firm stand with Mother. I went to Gaetano with a month’s rent and offered to rent the upper duplex.

  He seemed embarrassed by the proposition and said he had already offered the unit to a friend from work and couldn’t break his word. He offered me the furniture and the books. I suspected that my mother had warned Gaetano of my intentions. Upset at both Gaetano and Mother, I started looking for other available apartments in NDG.

  Meanwhile Mother was spending more and more time at Luigi’s home. She took care of the baby born the previous spring, so that my sister-in-law could return to her job. Luigi convinced our mother to move in with them. By the end of October, I found myself living on my own without actually having to move out. Mother took my single bed and left her bedroom set behind since it was too large for her new room. After that, Sean started spending some evenings at the apartment and little by little moved in his few possessions. But he also spent time in Ottawa, and with his old friends at the McGill ghetto, so that it still wasn’t clear where he actually lived.

  My apartment in the east end of the city doesn’t have the same appeal to Sean as the duplex in NDG, but he pays half the rent and uses it whenever it’s convenient. The only furniture we bought together is a set of bookshelves, with which we lined the room that had been my bedroom, and a sofa-bed for visitors, mostly for J.P., turning that room into a study/den.

  “I’ve never liked cheesy Italian weddings,” I explain to my friends at school. “The hall, the photographers, the bridesmaids, I never wanted all of that. Eventually we’ll have a simple civil ceremony with a few close friends.”

  “We’ll get married when Sean is more settled in his new job,” I told my mother.

  As far as the paesani are concerned, I pretend I’m living alone, and that Sean is only a frequent visitor. The chances of any of them visiting me late at night are slim. Though this duplicity about our living situation had, at first, seemed humourous to Sean and me, it makes me stumble whenever I’m asked about my marital status. With my friends and family, I act as if the marriage date is unimportant to me, but I do want to marry Sean and have a family of my own before it’s too late. I’m grateful, though, that, at least, I didn’t have to move my things out of the house against my mother’s wishes, and my reputation with the paesani, at least on the surface, remains intact.

  Sean and I joked about this outcome. “In the logic of the Calabrian love story,” he said, “this is the most romantic scenario you could have wished for.”

  19. SUNDAY LUNCH

  I CAN HARDLY MOVE, sitting in bed with Sean, the thick weekend paper on my lap, and his papers and books strewn all over the bedspread. On his side, Sean has propped his philosophy textbook, from which he’s taking notes, against my thigh. Now and then, he refers to other books piled between us. On the bed are a number of books on Jung he uses to research his topic, “Synchronicity-Integration, Wholeness and the Self.”

  I have taken to reading the book reviews every week. Sometimes I’ll even go out and buy one of the featured books.

  “You’re taking up all the space,” I say, as I try to fold a section of the newspaper.

  Sean is immersed in thought and says nothing. He spent Saturday afternoon until late evening at his party headquarters, planning for the next course of action. He fears he’ll have to suspend work on his thesis once a by-election is called.

  I put the paper down and leaf through The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, and become particularly intrigued by drawings of a mandala painting by Jung with his own words under the picture: “Only gradually did I discover what the mandala really is: ‘Formation, Transformation, Eternal Mind’s eternal recreation.’ And that is the self, the wholeness of the personality, which if all goes well, is harmonious, but which cannot tolerate self-deceptions.” I’m hypnotized by the bursts of shapes and motifs and the seemingly infinite variety of possibilities within the frame.

  As I shift my body, his philosophy textbook closes. “Sorry,” I say. “We either get a queen-size bed, or you do your studying from a desk.”

  “Aren’t you going to your mother’s for lunch?” he asks.

  “I guess I better get going,” I say. Then, as I walk toward the dresser, I add: “Can we reconsider the furniture we saw at the Danish House? This mirror really doesn’t go with this set.”

  “I thought the set had sentimental value to you. Just return the mirror.”

  “I like the mirror.”

  “Then maybe all you need is a re-staining to salvage the furniture.”

  I had never considered that option. For years, Mother had cleaned and rubbed the furniture every Saturday morning with a lemon-scented polish. The original color may have suffered from this over-diligent use of furniture wax. The set still looks modern with its play of basic rectangles in birch veneer. Short, slanted, spindly legs, painted black, give the utilitarian
dressers a dainty and precarious appearance. What an odd choice, I think, for a man of my father’s temperament to make. I imagine my stockily-built father, wearing his bricklayer clothes, with specks of white cement in his hair and on his hands, alone at Meubles Legaré on St. Hubert Street, selecting beds, tables, and frilly curtains for over the kitchen sink.

  “Are you coming for lunch?”

  “What’s the story about your friend’s husband and her brother Alfonso being connected to the mob?” he asks.

  “How would I know?” I reply. “It’s a domestic matter. Why can’t people just focus on that?”

  “J.P. is concerned. It seems that both her husband and brother have ties to some underworld figures … including Jack Russo.”

  Jack Russo’s name has come up a number of times in regard to rumours of collusion in the awarding of important construction contracts.

  “And why J.P.’s sudden concern about my family’s friends?”

  “It’s not official, yet, so you can’t talk about it, but Di Principe’s old riding is definitely open for grabs.”

  “Does that mean you’ll run?” I ask.

  “I have to prepare myself for the eventuality of running … and rounding up some supporters,” he says. “I’m planning on entering the race in the very riding this incident happened. I’ll be scrutinized like crazy. It doesn’t take much for the media to make connections.”

  “Connections with whom?”

  “Well, in politics we have to be very cautious. I wouldn’t want you and your family to be associated with this woman’s family and their problems. They’re deeply involved in the construction business, and in Laval, of all places, where City Hall is known to be a den of corruption. J.P. plans on ordering ten thousand brochures with your family’s picture on them.”