John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

His look showed something more childish than could be blamed on his nerd’s glasses, and he took the girls’ hands. He might’ve said that his sisters should wait with him outside the apartment, or Barb might’ve inferred it, picking up yet another code, reading it first in his gaze and posture and then in the spasmodic moaning and gulping that came from the apartment. The mother got the same message from the wide middle-aged back of her husband, in the doorway.

Keep the little ones away , was the message. Keep Dora and Syl from seeing Mama’s priest stretched out naked and fighting a heart attack.

Cesare lay on the couch, his arms and legs splayed up along the wall and down onto the floor, splayed and flailing, as if trying with all four limbs to grab some fat and invisible balloon lifting away from his midsection. Never mind if he exposed his distended cock and iron-gray pubic hair. Never mind if he fell off the couch, though Aurora held him in place, kneeling with one kimono-clad arm across his chest. Nothing mattered except to get hold of that escaping balloon, that ghost of a parade blimp, and the skinny old man pawed after the swollen impalpable thing even with the foot that was still in its black nylon sock. Indeed his drowning reach, his cold feet, all appeared more human than his face: a mottle of brick and chalk, with wrinkles like seismic fissures.

Here was another first morning in midtown, a cityscape so vivid as to suggest that her husband had melted out of Barbara’s way. Here again she needed to sort out the hard surfaces on which she’d stubbed her bones earlier from those against which she was banging for the first time. Banging, to see her priest in cardiac arrest and her mother-in-law beside him, an old couple discovered in the act — and yet Barbara also thought of the Latin, the dead language: in flagrante delicto . Banging and up-to-the-minute, the undone belt on Aurora’s kimono, the small nipples a brighter pink than Barb’s own — and yet what could be more basic, more timeless, than nakedness? What language was simpler than the Braille of the erogenous zones? Barbara could see that she sent the priest into worse convulsions, his eyes leaking tears and his gasps growing louder. His arms and legs trembled, all but losing hold of whatever it was they clung to, his nails scratching the wall and floor. But she couldn’t move, neither to spare Cesare the sight of her nor to help John Junior, on the phone in the corner, gabbling away like a frightened tourist: Aiuto! Aiuto ! Barb couldn’t budge from between old hurts and new, like what she’d seen on Whitman’s computer, a boy’s heart and nerves tucked into a file. Only Paul could defeat the paralysis, getting round his mom, his outstretched hands electric. Only Paul could keep on surprising them, laying one of his hands across the priest’s spasmodic chest, above the grandmother’s, while with the other going to the cracked wall of a face, to the mouth already open around a wordless but fluttering language-muscle…

“What kind of a woman are you?”

“Barbara, I apologize again. I’m so sorry you had to see this. But you must realize, you absolutely must, that Chezzo and I would never have—”

“Chezzo? What kind of a woman are you?”

“Oh, here we go.”

“Here we go? Are you saying, this is some kind of dance?”

“A dance indeed. Patently a dance. We’ve all known from Day One that it was only a matter of time before you cleared the floor and called me out for the big finale.”

“The finale? Aurora, a finale would be the answer to my prayers. Don’t you know how you stick in my craw? Can’t you imagine how many times I’ve wanted to tell you off once and for all?”

Aurora heaved a showy sigh, a movement that called attention to how small she was. Barefoot, in a flimsy kimono, the old playgirl barely came to Barbara’s chin. She wouldn’t get into a staring contest either. Instead the grandmother looked to Cesare, still flat on the sofa. One of the boys had covered the priest with a summer bedspread. Light cotton, powder blue, the blanket set off the man’s long face, its flush of color showing the good that Paul had done.

“That’s right,” Barbara said, “look at the poor guy. And he’s only the latest victim. He’s practically got holes in his neck.”

“Barb,” Jay said.

The in-law’s painted face seemed smaller, doll-like. Her hair might’ve been a kid’s, rumpled and glossy, jittering under the ceiling fan. She must’ve turned the thing on to help her and Cesare get comfortable.

“This isn’t the time,” the husband said.

“Oh, Jay. Are you saying there is a good time? There’s some better time for our kids, for instance? The father was dying , here, till Paul stepped in! So Jaybird, tell me. When’s a good time for them to at last understand what a, what a monster they’ve got living in their own—”

“Barbara, excuse me. If I may interrupt.” Aurora finger-combed one of her unruly patches of hair. “Am I correct in assuming that you had some reason for rushing everyone home like this?”

“Mother of God.” Barb suffered the whipsaw too, jam and recoil across the ribcage. “You’ve got no respect, no — no limits . Now you want to tell me how I should run my family?”

“Owl, hey. Think about it.”

“Your family, precisely. Would one be correct in assuming that it was some pressing new crisis for the family, that had you so suddenly rushing home?”

“Mom, you too. Easy.”

Barb looked to her husband, but he was checking down the hallway — the older boys and the twins had scurried off into the girls’ room. When the Jaybird swung round again, he glowered at his mother. “Look at you. Hardly any bigger than Paul, here. Plus, what, seventy-five years old, now? Hey. It’s lucky we didn’t find you and the father both having heart attacks.”

“Oh, John.” The grandmother fingered her kimono together at the throat, drawing in her bantam frame. “Really now, do I seem so frail?”

“You,” Barbara began, “you’re seventy-five years old. You’re a mother !”

“Easy there, Owl Girl. Think about it.”

Barbara dropped her head and tugged at an armpit. She hadn’t been wrenched around so badly since the museum.

“John has a point, Barbara. Think about the things I’ve learned, living under your roof these last ten days or so.”

What the mother thought of, seeing Aurora square her flinty shoulders, was of Roebuck and all the Alpha Moms before her.

“I mean to say, the children have been talking to me. They’ve told me a thing or two, you know. For that matter, so has Cesare here.”

“Him? Cesare?” The words came out quietly, surprising her. “What kind of a woman are you, getting a priest to talk?”

“Oh, here we go — you’re calling me a witch. It was inevitable, I suppose.”

“When I visited with the father, it was a sacrament.”

“I suppose I’m that witch Ulysses had the problem with. The woman who turned men into swine.” Her bright mouth crooked up smartly. “You know, Barbara, whenever I was lucky enough to enjoy a private moment with my Chezzo, the last thing I was interested in talking about was you and your secrets.”

Barbara tried to get her bearings. The space around her might still have been that first morning downtown. She might’ve come across Cesare in the niche of a catacomb, the tunnels of Napoli Sotterraneo , The only person who’d taken a chair, normal living-room activity, was the miraculous eleven-year-old. Meantime the grandmother was pressing her point, arguing that if she’d wanted “to start playing the bull in the china shop, around here, I could’ve found a far less humiliating way than this.” Today, the last thing Aurora and the fallen priest had expected was to have the rest of the family burst in on them.