John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“You’re a wolf in priest’s clothing!” she cried. “This is just another oily Latin-lover thing, another…”

The empty room had an echo; that stopped her. She’d been railing at the blue-bordered map of Naples, open on the family table. What had triggered her outburst, the mother realized, was that she couldn’t find DiPio’s clinic on the map.

She tugged at an armpit and turned to the door. Her bodyguard was across the piazza at the gelateria, but once she caught up with the overgrown boy, he assured her he knew “the asylum.” In half an hour Barb was down in DiPio’s office, and in another half an hour the place began to feel like just the change she’d been seeking.

Though a stopgap measure with Byzantine funding, the clinic meant business. The disaster had left behind a considerable spectrum of situational disorders. Even as the goatee’d medico finger-walked Barbara through the building directory, it sounded as if she’d stumbled on a transatlantic annex to the Samaritan Center. Here was a counselor who handled phobias, there a pair did group work on socialization, and a third specialized in dissociative episodes. Barbara saw post-traumatic stress, family-of-origin issues, and dual diagnoses. The tune was so familiar that she could sing the harmony right there across DiPio’s desk. Between what she’d learned over the winter and what he needed this summer, Barb had no trouble arranging another of those jobs-in-quotes. She didn’t have to mention reimbursement from the Consulate either, not with her husband already at work in the kitchen. For the next four or five days, until one of the doctors called Mrs. Lulucita into his office for a chat, she arrived at the clinic each morning at ten, with Jay and the boys.

Chris and JJ, though, never hung around the downtown studio for long. The boys were good for a chore or two, and if DiPio could think of some drug or other supply that didn’t need to be rushed back to the clinic ASAP the two teenagers were glad to handle the pickup. But for the few days that Barbara played at having a Master’s in Social Work, or the Italian equivalent, John Junior and Chris didn’t linger at the old palazzo much past the time Mama was assigned a client. As soon as DiPio had someone for her, JJ would throw the camera bag over his shoulder. He’d hook the canvas pouch to his belt as well, an extra precaution against scippatori , and the later some staff member would let Barbara know which of the security team had gone off with the boys. She and the Jaybird wouldn’t lay eyes on their two filmmakers again till dinner.

This was as she’d expected, really. She counted herself lucky just to get the brothers to stop calling DiPio’s place a “booby hatch.” She knew better than to take them seriously, too, when the teens suggested that the patients’ psychosis might “rub off.”

“That’s always the danger,” Chris said, “when you’re exposed to another culture. Like, it rubs off” The boy kept a remarkably straight face. “Next thing you know, JJ and me will go out and be crazy.”

“Hey,” said the older brother, “why go out?”

Wise guys. Barb had to admit, though, that the clinic hardly conveyed a sense of order. DiPio’s palazzo, like many in the centro storico , was a multi-generation treehouse. Five stories of unmatched heights, with porches in different places, teetered around a small courtyard that, at the time when some baron had tacked on the first of the upper floors, had served as the stable. Apartments burrowed from one converted space to another, from a Borbon widening to a Fascist subdivision. There were rooms that could only be reached by first stepping out onto a balcony. The doctor himself had made changes, setting up therapy-cubicles in a couple of street-floor parlors. When Cesare spoke about the place, he fell back on antique vocabulary: a veritable Bedlam .

So far as husband and wife were concerned, actually, Bedlam felt like a healthy work environment. Around the clinic Barb and Jay encountered fewer hot buttons, fewer issues that came back to sex. They might’ve been a couple of expats going partners on a B&B. The Jaybird never gave the least indication of hurt feelings, for instance, about having his wife outrank him. She was playing doctor, around DiPio’s studio , whereas Jay’s position might’ve been chief cook and bottle-washer.

Not that Barbara didn’t experience a worse shiver, now and again. There were times when she pulled open a door to discover something she hadn’t expected, a closet instead of an exit or a dormer instead of an office, and there came the shiver… not déjà vu, say rather gia visto . The chilling sense that, once more, she’d tumbled back into her first day in the old city. In the corner of one of the ground-floor wards, where the wall might’ve gone up over a medieval oven, where there might’ve lingered a tang of ash, Barbara discovered the standing cross from the Refugee Center. She had to touch the thing, jammed in at an angle. The corners of the wood remained furred here and there, no better sanded than the day Silky and Paul had carried it into the fluttering chapel. That hadn’t been so long ago, that visit to the Center. Yet how many reiterations of Day One had the mother suffered, since?

Now in the clinic Barbara stood staring at the cross until, behind her, one of the patients started to laugh. Or rather this guy pretended to laugh, his hilarity an imitation, too wicked to believe. A parody of a villain out of James Bond, and maybe he was right to poke fun. The mother couldn’t be certain this soft-pine cross was the one her middle child had helped slap together. A lot of accessories around here were makeshift. Cesare used to handle the Mass, but never on a regular schedule. Lately the Vomero priest had declined to drop by at all, claiming he was too busy (and when DiPio told Barbara that, she had almost broken into a wicked laugh herself). The old medico responded by bringing in Jay’s former colleague from the Refugee Center — what was his name? Interstate? In any case the hairless German with the Franciscan T at first seemed uncomfortable around Barbara. His Midwestern greeting sounded pinched. But the wife had no interest in raking through the garbage about Jay’s initial UN contract.

What difference did it make to her if, here at the clinic, a deal had been struck between the chaplain and his former American Boss, and a bit of cash had changed hands? What mattered was, the Jaybird would tell Barbara if she wanted to know. The husband would do as he’d promised; between him and his Owl Girl things were on a fresh basis. As for the Missouri-trained chaplain, Jay had gone so far as to show him a piece of paperwork from early June, a notice of a bank transfer Silky had arranged.

And as for the people under DiPio’s care, they found the German’s freewheeling religious services just the ticket. The cases here, like those out at the Center, had seen their worlds destroyed in more than a single, simple sense. Barbara could see why most of the clinic staff needed a couple of degrees and three or four languages. Her first morning downtown, she found herself shuttling between the kind of decision-making for which she was trained and considerably greater challenges. She took a hand in one-on-one counseling, in groups and role-playing sessions. Once or twice she even suggested her own therapeutic variation, since despite their education the counselors here remained Neapolitan, willing to improvise. And she liked it — hail Mary full of grace, she did. When Barbara got to try one of her improvisations (a “trial methodology”), she enjoyed a sober exhilaration that fired up all her daytime energies and yet never lost the sense she was in control. Whatever other alternatives she’d had to staying up in the Vomero apartment, none could’ve offered so sweet a fit to the nervous system.