Vinyl Cafe Unplugged (29 page)

Eugene and Maria came to Canada, from Italy, after the war.

Eugene arrived via America. Via New York City. He landed on New Year’s Day in 1948. One of nine brothers, he came to find a life.

He sent for Maria a year later. She landed at Pier 21, in Halifax, on Christmas Eve, 1949. She left the beautiful Calabrian countryside in tears and was sick all the way over. When she landed, in the middle of a gray Halifax afternoon, she vomited over the railing of the S.S.
Mauritania
one final time.

Halifax harbor didn’t even look real. It looked like a black-and-white photograph of a harbor. How could Eugene bring her to a country without colors? She was crying when she phoned him.
What have you done to me?
she asked.

Eugene landed a job in a restaurant as soon as he got to Canada. By the time Maria arrived, he had a job in a mattress factory. He worked on a machine that shaped the springs. He worked eleven, twelve hours a day. It was hard work, but he stayed at it for ten years. Then he went to Rothmans, packing cigarettes. That was his best job.

Soon they were able to buy a house. For the first five years they lived in an apartment in the basement and rented out the top two floors. They saved money. Slowly they moved upstairs. One floor at a time.

Eugene worked hard. But he lived for the garden he was building in the backyard.

He had grown up outside, barefoot, close to the land. His family made their living growing figs. But as well as fig trees he had grown up with grapevines and orange trees and peach trees, with lambs and pigs, and a cow and chickens. They had sheep as well. And a donkey. When he was ten it was his chore to fetch water. His father would strap wooden barrels onto the donkey, and Eugene would ride it through the village and fill the barrels at the well and walk it home.

Every night before bed Eugene’s mother led them in an hour of prayer. His father would sit by the table with a rosary in his hand and hit anyone who fell asleep. In winter they would lie four kids to one bed, using coals from the fire in a steel bed-warmer. In the summer they slept outside on a platform in a large oak tree. They covered the platform with straw and then covered the straw with blankets.

They played hoops and soccer with a ball Eugene’s older brother sent from the States. They threw stones against the school wall and bet who could get their rock closest. They used buttons for money. Eugene was in grade three the first time he bet. He came home holding up his pants, his shirt flapping open, every last button cut off his clothes.

When his grandfather died, he left Eugene his rifle. An antique two-chamber carbine. Eugene used it to hunt rabbits. When the war came, Eugene wrapped the rifle in linen and buried it in the yard. When the Germans left, he dug it up. The week before he left for America, he broke the rifle into two pieces and threw one half in the Adriatic and one half in the Mediterranean. He wanted to take the rifle with him to America, but he didn’t want problems with immigration.

It all seemed like yesterday, but he had left home fifty-two years ago.

Dave and Morley bought the house beside Eugene and Maria two years before Stephanie was born. They moved in over a weekend in April and lived there for two months before Maria and Eugene acknowledged their presence.

It happened almost by accident. Morley was unloading groceries and she came face to face with Maria at the side of the house.

“We’re your new neighbors,” said Morley, resting her arm-load of food on the hood of the car, self-consciously holding out her hand. “My name is Morley.”

Maria was carrying a basket of garden clippings toward the street. She nodded shyly, but she didn’t put her basket down.

“Big house for two people,” she said, leaving Morley by her car, her hand sticking out stupidly.

It took a year for the ice to thaw. Like any thaw it happened so slowly, so imperceptibly, that Morley didn’t notice the change in the weather until it was over. It began with the washing. There is a solidarity that cannot be ignored between two women who still hang clothes outside to dry in the sun. It began one morning with a cautious smile when Maria and Morley found themselves, almost side by side, hanging sheets on their clotheslines. Then one day, to her surprise, Morley realized that she and Maria had started talking. It wasn’t long before she realized that the only thing they were talking about was her pregnancy.

Maria, it turned out, was a veritable wellspring of reproductive advice. She was as ready as Morley’s mother to unburden herself.

The morning Morley ran to throw up, Maria nodded happily. “Means baby will have lots of hair.”

“Drink one coffee black every day,” she told her one afternoon. “Baby will be quiet.”

And when Morley started craving anchovies, Maria was delighted. “Smart baby. You will have a smart baby.”

By the sixth month Maria had decided Morley was having a boy. She would point at her belly and smile.

“This is boy baby. A boy, this is.” She would not explain how she could know the sex of the unborn child. “I know,” she said, laughing.

Morley, who didn’t like the superstition, and was growing impatient with the constant attention, tried to ignore her. But it rattled her. She didn’t want to know the sex of her first child. And it worried her that Maria might know something. Her accent and old-world ways gave her credibility.

“Do you think she knows?” Morley would ask Dave. “Really? Do you think she does? How could she know?”

It was Dave who put his finger on it.

“Maybe,” he said one night, “maybe she is telling you what she thinks you want to hear. Maybe she thinks she’s giving you good news.”

It had the ring of truth. And even though it made her sad to think that there were still people who thought having a son was better than having a daughter, it softened Morley, and it somehow excused Maria’s intrusiveness. She was trying to be kind. She was operating out of good intentions. Morley wondered why Maria, who seemed so passionately interested in pregnancies and babies, had only one child.

Dave, meanwhile, was feeling profoundly uncomfortable every time he went into his backyard to relax. Every time he sat down with a beer, or the paper, or tried to listen to a ball game, there was Eugene on the other side of the fence, working on something. Dave couldn’t imagine himself with a vegetable garden. Still, Eugene’s activity made him feel inadequate. He took to turning his chair so that his back faced Eugene’s yard.

Stephanie was born in September. Eighteen hours of labor. Seven and a half pounds. A week after Morley came home from the hospital Maria arrived at the front door for the first time ever. When Morley answered the bell, she was standing on the stoop, holding a basket of fresh tomatoes and a small wrapped present.

“For baby,” she said, holding out the present. It was a hand-knitted sweater.

Morley felt awful. She was disheveled and exhausted. She was wearing stained sweat-clothes. She was holding Stephanie (who had just spat up on her back) against her shoulder. She knew she should invite Maria in, but the house was as big a mess as she was. She couldn’t.

A few days later Maria arrived again. This time with an armful of zucchini. As they stood awkwardly at the door, Maria spotted the basket of tomatoes still sitting on the floor where Morley had put them down. There was a cloud of fruit flies dancing around them like dust motes in the sun. They both stared at the basket. Without a word, Maria brushed past Morley, picked it up and left. Morley was horrified. She called Dave in tears.

That night, around suppertime, the doorbell rang again. It was Maria, this time with Eugene. She had turned the tomatoes into a rich pasta sauce. She was carrying a pot of penne with Italian sausage. Eugene was holding a dish of zucchini and rapini sautéed in garlic and olive oil. He had a loaf of fresh bread tucked under his arm and a bottle of wine sticking out of his pocket. They set everything on the kitchen table.

“Mangia. Mangia,”
said Eugene, backing awkwardly toward the door.

“We walk with baby,” said Maria, picking Stephanie up and carrying her to the stroller.

They were gone in under five minutes. They had spoken less than a dozen words.

They brought Stephanie back two hours later. She began to cry when they left.

And so they became neighbors. And slowly they found their way together. As the years passed it was clear that Eugene and Maria liked Morley and Dave and loved their kids. Maria continued to offer advice about child-rearing. She understood the pressures of early parenthood. She often arrived at the front door unannounced and took both kids for long walks—wandering patiently through the neighborhood while Sam studied hubcaps and Stephanie poked at flowers. These seemingly aimless hikes always ended at an Italian bakery, where Sam and Stephanie both developed what would become a lifelong passion for cannoli, panettone and zabaglione.

It was a river that flowed two ways. Dave brought Eugene and Maria records from his record store—Italian opera and Italian folk music, Maria Callas and Gigli.

Eugene taught Morley (not Dave) how to grow tomatoes, and how to care for their pear tree.

It was one of those friendships that can only happen between neighbors. A friendship that happened mostly out of doors—mostly in the backyard. A friendship that would never have developed if it wasn’t for the children.

Eugene and Maria moved back into the basement apartment the summer Stephanie was fourteen. The move wasn’t planned. There was a five-day heat wave at the end of July. On the second night Eugene slept in the basement bedroom because it was cooler down there. Maria joined him the next night.

They moved the television down the night after. There was already a kitchen there, and a bathroom with a tub. They could walk right out into the garden. They had everything they needed.

They moved back upstairs for the winter.

They were both relieved the following May to move back down. They didn’t need stairs in their lives anymore.