The Women of Saturn Read online

  I put my hands up in exasperation. “J.P. should wait until I speak to my family about the picture.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  “Well, I haven’t. I just can’t believe what you’re saying after all the years you’ve known my family. What does my family have to do with what happened? We’re not even related to that family, and even if we were, would we be automatically held responsible for the actions of Alfonso’s wife’s family? I don’t even know who they are, for Christ’s sake … never even met them…. Okay, I saw them at Alfonso’s wedding, but never even spoke to them. Are we suspects simply because we’re from the same village or because we’re Italian? Tell J.P. he’s watched The Godfather too many times.”

  “No need to get worked up, Cat.”

  “I only get worked up because we are dealing with a family tragedy here, and you only see these people as stock mob characters. You’re doing what you’ve always objected to, judging people without knowing anything about them … only by their affiliations or their nationality. You’ve always disapproved of stereotyping. Anyway, if J.P. isn’t comfortable being seen in this house, he’ll do me a favour by staying away.”

  “J.P. is going out of his way to get me nominated. It could be something good for me … for us. I’m just repeating what I heard. And, actually, he’s only reacting to all the coverage on Allô Police.”

  “Well, if you believe Allô Police, Italians are always settling accounts. We’re either the best or the worst accountants around. As if other people’s murders are not about settling of accounts,” I conclude.

  Sean doesn’t respond. I start getting dressed and change subject, “It’s funny how stories continue in real life without us noticing,” I say.

  “What stories?” Sean asks.

  “I’m thinking of my paesana, Lucia, and what has happened to her. Twenty years ago, she was a young girl married to a man she had never met. Because of gossip and politics, she left her boyfriend of many years to come here. I thought that was a story in and of itself.”

  “Well … wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but what I’m trying to say is that, once a story is written, you’d think that would be it … the end of the story, right? I never gave the characters another thought, as if their lives after the crossing didn’t matter. But for twenty years, these people have continued living that story. Now these people make the local news, and it all sounds so banal when we read about it—no hint of how or why it started … then.”

  “I really don’t know where you’re going with this, Cat. Stories are happening all the time.”

  “I’m thinking of the beginning of this story … the past … the village … the voyage, and how real-life stories never quite end, and until they’re written down, it’s as if they don’t count. They only become stories if they get written down.”

  “I’m having a hard time following you. You’re going around in circles … as usual. First of all, stories don’t always have to be written. They can also be told orally, or sung, as in ballads. Your story sounds like an Italian opera—husband is jealous, accuses wife of cuckolding him, kills wife, cries, and sometimes kills himself too. Leoncavallo did it in I Pagliacci; Shakespeare before him in Othello. Here, it’s material for a Calabrese soap opera.”

  “How come it’s called a tragedy when Shakespeare does it?”

  “Well … Shakespeare was a genius, that’s why. It’s not so much the story that’s important, but how it’s told. One’s tragedy can be someone else’s melodrama. In any case, Cat, just so you know, this story is not that interesting for the general reader. It’s been done a few times before, and the ending is predictable.”

  “There is no ending yet.”

  “If you insist.”

  “And everything’s been done before. Gira e rigira, we say.”

  While Sean and most of the city lazes in bed, I force myself to get dressed and drive to my brother’s house in NDG for Sunday lunch. When we first started going out together, Sean had been only too happy to join in the tradition, and to eat platefuls of pasta, but he broke the practice when he started spending weekends in Ottawa.

  Mother accepts Sean’s need to stay home on Sundays in the same manner that she accepts his other reasons for not complying with family customs. “He’s English,” she explains to herself and to her friends. But Mother would only consider a major snowstorm or an illness to be acceptable reasons for me to stay away from Sunday lunch. She always packs plates of leftover food for me to bring to Sean.

  I call my mother by phone every day, but I prefer to talk about anything of importance during these relaxed Sunday lunches, when the topic can be bounced off all the family. I mention the news about Sean running in a by-election and the family picture J.P. wants to use for publicity, but the conversation centres on Angie and Lucia.

  “You shouldn’t have taken the responsibility of taking someone like her daughter in your class,” Mother says

  “What do you mean, like her daughter? You haven’t even met the girl.”

  “I don’t have to meet her. From what I’ve heard, her own parents have been having problems with her.”

  “Maybe her parents haven’t been much help,” my brother says.

  “Especially her father,” I say.

  “Let’s not always blame the father…. Maybe we shouldn’t talk before we know all the facts,” Luigi replies.

  “Don’t you remember Lucia?” Mother adds. “Her brother had to pull her by the hair more than once before she got married. And remember the voyage? It seemed to last a hundred years because of her.”

  “Ah, ‘the voyage,’” my brother says. “What took you so long to bring it up? We always end up talking about ‘the voyage.’”

  Mother still speaks about the ocean crossing in terms of both dread and awe.

  “If we have to talk about it…” I add, turning toward Mother. “You never got out of bed the whole time. I was the one stuck looking after Lucia, while Luigi played with his friends.”

  “And I was the one to worry about her,” Mother says. “You were too young.” Then, she adds, “Have you forgotten how her husband treated your father? And now I have to worry about her daughter?”

  “Ma, let bygones be bygones. You worry too much,” Luigi says.

  “Yes, let me do the worrying this time,” I say.

  “If her daughter is anything like Lucia, you have reason to worry,” she says. “Don’t think that Lucia has been a saint.”

  I look at my brother, exasperated. I want to answer, “And why should she have had to be a saint?” but I say nothing. It would not serve any purpose to try to argue with my mother, or my brother, about these things anymore.

  My brother says, “Ma, we were not in the same room with her and her husband when this thing happened, so we can’t talk”

  She says. “Il buon giorno si vede dal mattino—you can tell from the beginning how a story is going to end up.”

  “Tell me—since you’re so good at storytelling—how is this one going to end?” I ask, somewhat amused.

  Mother tastes the pasta, brings the pot of boiling water to the sink, and throws it in the strainer before responding: “It’s already ended. Her husband was a difficult man … maybe he was even the devil. But a bad and a good never make something bad happen. It takes two bad people for that. A good wife should know how to keep the peace in a home and talk sense into her husband.”

  I simply shake my head. A family photograph we took on the last Palm Sunday my father spent in Mulirena has a prominent place on the dining room buffet. Mother points to it. “Your father was as good as a piece of bread, but even he had his moments. He would not have forgiven what they did to him.”

  “If he hadn’t died so soon, he would have had his day. He would have shown them all,” Luigi says.

  We eat quietly. I think of my father and of his a
bsences from our life. In Italy, he left regularly to work in Milan as a stone mason and only spent a few days with us in the village on special holidays. His returns from Milan were always filled with joy, as he brought candies and small toys to all the children in the neighbourhood. I remembered his jolly face and how his cheeks puffed up as he played the trumpet in the village band.

  The photograph was taken on the last summer he spent with us. His usual happy disposition changed whenever he spoke of his impending trip to Canada, as if he was somehow betraying his own country by leaving it. He left because everyone else was doing so, and he had had big dreams.

  After lunch, Tina arrives and joins us for coffee. The conversation again turns to Lucia and the village.

  “The summer your father left was the last good summer we had,” she reminds us.

  PART IV

  OCTOBER 6-7, 1980

  20. THE FINGER-WAVING LESSON

  NEWS OF ANGIE’S MOTHER’S BEATING has spread through the school. Suddenly her husband’s violent temperament, his disappearance, Lucia’s reclusive character, and especially their connection to Jack Russo have become public knowledge. In class, I try to discourage the gossip; theories of what may have happened are too easily thrown about. As usual, Linda and Franca have different views.

  “The poor woman looked spaced out when I saw her a month ago,” Linda tells the class. “She was shopping with Angie on St. Hubert. Maybe she was really unhappy and just wanted out.”

  “She’s been married for twenty years. Why hasn’t she tried to leave him before? I think her husband and brother are mixed up in the Mafia,” Franca answers.

  Then Maria, one of the shyest students, offers a scoop of her own. Her neighbour, who knows the family, had been at a function at the Casa D’Italia just a week before the beating, and had seen Lucia there, all dressed up like a twenty-year-old, but without her husband.

  “My neighbour said it was the first time she’d seen Lucia look so friendly. She always looked lost in her own world, but that time, she was smiling at everyone,” Maria says

  “See?” Linda responds. “She was probably flirting and having an affair and he found out.”

  “And he put a contract on her because she knew too much. You don’t fuck around with these people,” Franca replied.

  Oh, Lucia could be a flirt all right! I remember her black eyes, piercing and direct when she was upset, but coy when she smiled. And smile she did at both Nicodemo and Armando on the ship. Was that her last hurrah before she met her older husband in Montreal, or did she continue betraying him, and with whom?

  A few weeks before the assault Lucia had been seen smiling. Now I wish I knew what had made her come out of her “spaced-out” state before she was forced back into sleep.

  Her sudden appearance on the community banquet circuit baffles me. Lucia’s brother, Alfonso, and his wife, have many connections in the community, and they attend many social functions, but Lucia and her husband have been known as recluses in their Laval home. Why the sudden change in Lucia since moving out of her home, and what made her attend the function? Maria doesn’t know what the event was all about. I should try to find out. Was Lucia experiencing an awakening of sorts, the euphoria of a new beginning?

  I listen to all the talk with the uneasy feeling that I have been a silent witness to whatever in Lucia’s past conspired toward the blow that put her in a coma. As a child, I recorded the events in my life and Lucia’s life as quaint customs of village life, as reminders of bygone days, but I had never really stopped to think about how the woman’s mind and soul may have been affected by it all.

  I prepare a mannequin to give the demonstration on finger waving. I approach the demonstration with apprehension. The hairdressing technique has gone the way of flappers and prohibition, and to justify the tedium of the manual exercises, I have to first persuade students of their purpose and usefulness. Finger waving is the most basic of hairdressing skills, I tell the class, and the first that needs to be mastered before moving on to the newer techniques. To myself, I reflect: untangling the past with a fine-toothed comb can be, in hairstyling as well as in life, a useful exercise when attempting to understand the present.

  As for every practical hairdressing lesson, I ask the students to form a semicircle around me. First, I show the photo plates from a Vanity Fair magazine I had bought at a flea market. I lecture on how the clothes and short hairstyles of the Roaring Twenties reflected the spirit of merriment and abandon that overtook America during the era of jazz and prohibition. Pictures of speakeasies and women dancing the Charleston in bobbed hair make me remember the stories that my grandfather had told me in Mulirena.

  He, like thousands of other southern Italians in the early twentieth century, emigrated to North America to earn some money before returning to the paese. He never took to the New World and ran away from it, unable to tolerate the harsh life of the early immigrants, exploited by their own kind, and treated like pariahs by the rest of society. It disgusts me now how the Godfather’s infamous Don Corleone is mythologized as a hero, especially by young people, even though his empire was built on murder and modelled after the Black Hand, the vicious organization that preyed on the early immigrants and was the precursor of the Mafia in the U.S.

  Grandfather had told mother and me more than once, “Good thing you’re going to Montreal. New York is a bordello of a place.” Judging by the news, it looks as if Montreal is catching up to New York on that count.

  The finger-waving technique itself is simple enough to describe to the class. I draw a zigzag pattern on the board, and then shape a semicircle on the mannequin, then another semicircle in the opposite direction creating a ridge in between two valleys. In slow motion I repeat a few times each hand movement necessary to shape another ridge, another valley.

  “It looks easy,” one student says.

  “It is easy. One hand follows the other. Each hand must complement the other.”

  I then instruct the students to practice on their own mannequin. I walk around and repeat my instructions to each student as I guide their hand and comb movements. Some students pick it up almost instinctively; others are all thumbs, and can’t coordinate their two hands to work as one.

  I wonder what it is that makes some people find the perfect balance of give and take, pull and push. Looking at the drawing on the board, I wish I had a better trick to help my struggling students—the rows of triangles are too pointy to illustrate the rounded movements of a wave. The zigzag drawing is too simplistic and all wrong. It makes me think of uncertainty, a going forward and retreating without a clear destination … an impasse, while a wave is all fluidity. My drawing skills are as limited as my verbal ones, and I wish I had a better teaching device to express the beauty of the undulating line, flowing freely into peaks and valleys, harmonious, unbroken, endless.

  Some students have difficulty with the exercise and quickly lose patience and become restless. “It’s so old fashioned, Miss,” they complain. They compare each other’s efforts and laugh at the zigzagged clumps of sticky hair on some of the mannequins.

  Mr. Champagne walks into the class with the guidance counsellor, Julie. He looks disapprovingly at me while some of the girls, preparing for the lunch break, are putting on their makeup, their combs and wet towels still scattered all over the counter. I try to attract the students’ attention and call them to order but with little success. They are unconcerned by the presence of these superiors.

  The principal speaks in a strained voice to tell me that Social Services called him. Given the fact that Angie’s mother is still hospitalized, they have advised him to keep Angie in school until they can sort things out with the family.

  “But,” he adds, “We’ll have to set some strict ground rules for her, if she is to return.”

  Then Julie, using the slow, soft voice of those who work in the caring professions, tells me I should work with the supp
ort of the Special Ed department in handling Angie.

  “Bruce has already offered his help,” I say.

  Julie then explains not to expect Angie in yet. There’s a problem with her living accommodations. She says. “Angie’s uncle informed us that his mother and niece would be moving to his house in Laval. The older woman refuses to stay alone in the city after what has happened.” At the suggestion of Social Services, Julie is considering finding a foster home to place Angie in, from Monday to Friday, closer to school to make it easier for her to attend classes.

  “Oh, I doubt that her family would allow her to stay in a stranger’s home,” I say.

  “Well,” says Mr. Champagne, “Attendance is compulsory and lateness will no longer be tolerated.”

  Julie says she finds it hard communicating with the family. The uncle’s English is very weak, and the grandmother doesn’t speak it at all. “Cathy, could I ask you to translate for me next time I speak to them?”

  “Absolutely. Anytime. Look, this is only a thought…” I add instinctively. “I could probably have Angie stay with me while her mother is at the hospital. I have an apartment not far from the school. I’d drive her to school in the morning.”

  Both Julie and Mr. Champagne seem startled by my suggestion.

  “I have a spare room. My apartment is not far from where Angie lived with her grandmother,” I add.

  “It’s something to consider, but I’ll have to clear it with a few people—especially the family,” Julie says.

  “Oh, I’m sure that the family won’t have any problem with it. They know me well.”

  The principal turns his stare on me, but doesn’t say anything as they leave.