John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

During every visit, Barbara would study that weekend’s date. In the man’s eyes, she always saw the same questions: This isn’t going to get much crazier, is it? It isn’t going to get much scarier? Not much, brother. The affairs never lasted. The men would slingshot around the grandmother for a month or two, then whistle away with their tails on fire. And here on this side of the Atlantic the air-time wasn’t likely to get any less turbulent. Aurora had arrived for the visit without a boy-toy, and Barbara would bet — what? the cost of a remodel for Roebuck’s office? — she would just bet that her mother-in-law was going to score some local talent. The woman claimed she lived in Greenwich Village because she found it “romantic,” and Naples might’ve been the city that had given Greenwich Village the idea. Her most likely victim in town, in fact, began to seem obvious by the fourth or fifth day after the grandmother’s arrival. Dottore DiPio, sure. The doctor was a bit of a dandy himself, and during these housebound days, his beard-plucking grew ever more agitated around the grandmother.

When Aurora spoke to the priest, on the other hand, the man went quiet. He stopped shuffling his knobby joints. Barbara assumed the old playgirl offended him, but when she asked Cesare about her in-law, she didn’t like his answers.

“Our Savior,” he said, “condemns hypocrisy. The whited sepulcher, don’t you know, that hides our rot. But your Aurora accepts her decay. She honors it.”

Barb figured Cesare was impressed by the widow’s charities. Barb had told him how, at the Samaritan Center, the donors’ plaque listed Jay’s mother as an “Angel.”

“She’ll be useful to you,” the priest went on. “Italians respect a woman like Aurora. With her around, they’ll tend more to steer clear.”

Barbara had noticed as much already. When she did get out, these days, she experienced the same falloff in local attentions as John Junior. The day Jay began his duties at DiPio’s downtown clinic, she took everyone else back to the sports facility, the soccer field. Everyone, including Aurora and the security. But this time, there and back, even Paulo miracolo went pretty much un-harassed. The boy was asked to bless a saint’s medallion or two, naturally, and Barbara as well. Also the group had another clandestino keeping an eye on them, trailing the crew for a few blocks, while never daring to approach, to panhandle. But the guy was another harmless stick of a sub-Saharan. He disappeared as soon as Barb pointed him out to one of the security. The only significant interruption, really, came from the energetic Maddalena.

The celebrity girlfriend no longer needed to carry a camera, but that day she’d settled in with the other media, behind the sawhorses in the piazza. She stuck around, too, after Jay hiked off to the funiculare and the clinic downtown. By the time Barbara and the others appeared on the stoop, Maddalena might’ve been the only journalist waiting. Then she hurdled the sawhorse, with an eye-catching flip of her tight-jeaned legs. The security didn’t faze the girl. Two of the squad had to brace Maddalena in a way that made Barbara think of the scene out in the tent-chapel at the Refugee Center. But even then the young woman kept asking, just this side of screaming, that Paul meet with her boyfriend Fond. Ten minutes was all the former hunger striker asked for, ten minutes .

One of the men from Interpol reached under his lapel, but the mother put out a hand. There’d been enough of that.

Maddalena didn’t fail to notice. “Signora,” she cried, “you know my Fondo! You know he has good heart!”

JJ bent towards his mother’s ear. “I’m so sure,” he said, “this girl knows all about a good heart. That’s why she was in such a rush to get her face on the news.”

“He will give you new meaning!” Maddalena called, as the family started away. “Your prayers and your miracles, they will have new meaning! A new life!”

But to judge from the rest of the excursion, free of stop and go and hassle that had always been part of the package with Kahlberg, the Lulucitas already had a new life. The pretty reporter and her Hermit Crab contact were behind the curve. Rather Barb now had to figure out where, in this renewal, could she fit all her old guilt? Whoever she’d become here in Naples, a good witch who guided her family to the greater truth or a banshee who wailed the end of everything — whoever, she wasn’t the woman she’d been before these lengthening June days, in this reeking city layered like the decades of a rosary, or like a long marriage.

And Aurora, new in town, was something else again. The priest wasn’t alone in saying that the septuagenarian prankster, always ready for a quick game of cards or Monopoly, Nerf-ball or birds-&-ponies, did the kids some good. She offered a healthy alternative, after a month when their Mama had come across as ever more fire-&-brimstone. Dr. DiPio had told Barbara the same. Of course the old medico was already under Aurora’s spell, the black widow had put him on the menu, but when it came to the children he could still be trusted. He’d fingered his Christopher medal and claimed that the grandmother “increased total sympathy levels.” Nor could Barb fail to notice that, with the mother-in-law around, everyone under twenty-one acted more goofball and agreeable. A couple of times the kids even mounted impromptu performances on the balcony, doing their bit for whoever might still have a camera, down in the piazza. They pretended to be a rock band, and Paul was the surprise star of the performance. The middle child threw in loose-hipped dance moves while his brothers wailed away on air guitar, rather Broadway in his black and white, almost like that choreographer with the Italian name — was it Fosse?

A day or so after Jay started his job at DiPio’s clinic, Barbara announced that the older boys could go down to the centro with their father, if they cared to pitch in. A “situation” that hadn’t been “compromised,” according to Attaché Roebuck, the clinic was a psychiatric facility for disorders resulting from the earthquake. It was the same jerry-rigged baronial home, its closets made over as offices, to which the doctor had taken the family on the first day after the assault. The place was tailor-made for sneaking off. Boys like Chris and JJ would have no trouble showing up to “pitch in,” and then gallivanting all over the original city. They could set up any assignations they liked. Then there was Jay’s job, another word that belonged in quotes, though Roebuck and the former VP had worked out a position title that wouldn’t damage the resume. Nevertheless, not quite a week after Jay had worked out the deal, the mother announced that Chris and JJ were free to join their father downtown. She used the news to kick off the dinner conversation, while setting out a hefty platter of octopus sautéed with garlic. More than that, declared the newly-fledged Owl, she’d come up with something fun for Paul and the girls to do.

With that, Barbara wound up in her first direct exchange with Aurora.

“Why, bravo,” the old playgirl told her. “Ever since I’d heard about our Junior here and that girl, I’ve thought there was no point pretending, simply hiding our heads in the sand and pretending. Of course they were going to try to see each other.”

Barb put her clean hand, the one untouched by olive oil, in Dora’s hair.

“Nothing so inflames love’s sensibility,” Aurora said, “as being forcibly kept apart. Why, it goes back to the myths, Hero and Leander. It goes back to the Kama Sutra. ‘Once the wheel of love has turned,’ you know.”

From where Barbara stood, she had a good view of Aurora’s favorite studio portrait. The merry widow never traveled without it. The photographer had posed her facing a fan, a silk scarf trailing from her silky hair. Aurora Isadora.