John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

Not that, now as they came up on three weeks in the city, the mother could forget the trouble she’d seen the first time she looked at a map. Whatever good she might get from the night traffic, in daylight Barbara was barely coping. Five days after dell’Ovo, her counterespionage, she found herself once more trailing behind the Lieutenant-Major. She’d discovered his secret, his and Jay’s and yet nearly a week had gone by with her doing next to nothing about it. This morning again, she followed the NATO plan.

And her children too. The family, minus Jay and plus Kahlberg, were all getting their photograph taken on the steps of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale .

They were tourists again. As the group posed for the papers, to either side waited day-trippers in loose bright nylon and shelf-like waist-packs. The museum overlooked the original downtown and dominated the guidebooks. Chris had read from the Blue Guide: “of prime importance.” Then there was the tourist pitch, Vedi Napoli e mouri , see the Nazionale and die. That was the translation, right? The museum was the only reason most Americans came to town, right? Its exhibits gleaned from the entire ruin-speckled lower peninsula, greater metropolitan Siren-land. As Silky’s choice for the first family excursion since dell’Ovo, it seemed a no-brainer.

Barbara went along.

This was after five days of recovery. Five days she’d hesitated, before heading to the Nazionale or anywhere else, instead shaping her time around the family’s eleven-year-old question mark. These were five days without talking to the media, number one, and without fighting over what she’d overheard in the castle hallway, number two. Of course she’d told her husband, the very night, and Jay had understood what the discovery meant. As the week went on, he’d arranged to stay home more than half the time. Once or twice when he and Barb were alone together, he’d felt for the band of her underwear, but even then she’d found his expression wary. Still, what was there to fight about, once the wife made clear that her worst fears had been confirmed? What was the point of yelling and banging? What mattered was telling the kids, finding the moment.

The Jaybird had his testy moments, his fully loaded stares, but by and large he too had kept their dealings mild. As Barb and he stretched out on the bed he would agree, in a conversational rumble, that she needed to leave for America and find a good legal mediator the moment his mother arrived. Indeed the big man’s self-restraint left the wife that much more committed to silence and withdrawal herself, during these days at home. To see the husband this way triggered, in her, her worst cross-the-heart zigzags yet. At her most confused, Barbara suffered the impression that the things she and Jay spoke of weren’t actually going to take place, but had only been given voice as a shared penance. A two-person rosary.

These were five days of many an unsettling sensation, with the girls endlessly underfoot and Silky watching the family’s every move. Sometimes the officer stopped in at the apartment and sometimes he used his cell, but either way he felt like a burden. After all, DiPio too dropped in for his checkups, AM and PM. Then there was Romy and JJ, finagling moments for their puppy love, for hugging and kissing out back by the palazzo dumpster, while the mother waited, in the doorway to the alley but made it a point not to watch, like the NATO gunman who’d also been party to arranging the tryst, averting his eyes at the alley entrance. The kids’ make-out sessions went on for a couple-three days before the Lieutenant-Major heard about them, of course he heard, and of course he called to object even as he was on the way up to the Vomero to make certain the teen sweethearts wouldn’t get together again — fat chance of that, Silky, but Barb had to deal with the man’s call as soon as she and her oldest returned to the apartment from their latest trip down to the alley. Barbara had to deal with it all these days, plus she always had to work in an hour or so of reading aloud to Paul, no matter what else was going on. Also she chose the DVDs for the evenings. Among them were a couple in Italian, made in Hollywood but dubbed in Italian, because she’d noticed how all her boys liked to laugh at what became of the dialog. Likewise after she saw how Paul enjoyed a certain flaked ricotta pastry, nuggeted with fruit bits, she arranged for the pasticceria to send over two a day, and when she saw him dig into the pizza from Acunzo, the following night she had them deliver a selection of their best. The day after dell’Ovo she’d announced to the kids that no one besides their father was allowed on the street until further notice, but then that very afternoon, following a call in Dick-&-Jane English from one of the NATO boys stationed at the stoop, she’d allowed the first of JJ’s conjugal visits down in the alley. And the next day there’d been the first of her renewed sessions with Cesare (and Barbara had the NATO van take her those few blocks, and she ignored the supplicant or two who always came to her, unless they reached her on the steps of her church, in which case she allowed herself a touch of their upraised Catholic doodads), and then the third day, gutting her stay-at-home rule altogether, she arranged an afternoon soccer scrimmage for JJ and Chris with the girls and Paul as cheerleaders. This was the middle child’s suggestion. His demand, rather, and he wouldn’t allow Mama to park him in a wheelchair, either. The family miracolino , it turned out, was the one for yelling and banging, so stir-crazy and over-examined by the third day that he waved his girlish hand in Mama’s face and hollered he wasn’t some kinda in, in, invalid for God’s sake! These dumb he, he, healing episodes weren’t that h-hard on him! As the boy carried on, rising to a full-blown preadolescent tantrum, he provided Barbara a contradictory reassurance; he reminded her of anger plain and simple, something she herself didn’t seem able to manage these days. Later, during the scrimmage itself, Paul spent most of his time jumping up and down along the sidelines, stippling the cuffs of his black pants with snippets of new-mown grass.

These were five days complicated further by a media circus, in which some cameraman was set up under the balcony every time the mother looked and newspaper stringers appeared never to need so much as a coffee break (anyway, in the Vomero you didn’t need to go far to find a good café). The ringmaster, however, wasn’t any journalist or production chief. Rather it was the revived African hunger striker who dominated the scene on the piazza out front of the family’s place, a young man still little more than skin and bone but nonetheless capable of such intensity that Barbara could feel his staring from five floors up. And soon enough, beside the not-so-clandestino , there appeared the enterprising Maddalena. The woman might’ve been a rookie reporter, but she’d learned long ago what it meant to have youth and good looks. At once she grasped the advantage in coming round to the front of the camera, especially buddied up beside a young man who’d been pretty lucky himself when it came to lips and eyes and bone structure. The would-be suicide, as he returned to his natural physical bearing, turned out to be a stirring package of lightsome and hard-packed, a coppery spokesmodel for The South. His color fell midway between the dun of Maddalena’s skin and the black of her hair, and this range of tones made them all the more eye-catching. Cuter still was the way they would help each other with their English, as they went on the air with repeated thanks to “these so special Americans who reach out to the poor and hopeless.” These video clips were replayed a hundred times, and every day either Barbara or Jay had to stand up against the photogenic young couple’s pressure for some sort of a press event with Paul. Either Barb or the Jaybird had to repeatedly refuse, while a small but respectable fraction of the world’s attention was drawn to this “refugee Lazarus” (the headline writers had a great time). By the end of his third day back on his feet the former illegal alien regained, with the help of Amnesty International and the Italian Green Party and the rock star Sting, his right to walk the streets.