FLYING

In 1945, my future father-in-law cheered American soldiers liberating his town in Sicily. Years later, he was far less happy when his son married an American. He never learned my last name. “Too long and foreign,” he said. Basta. Case closed. Now he’s lost track of my first name. The summer we moved back to my country after 10 years in his, the long knives came out. He told my husband in our daughter’s hearing, “Marrying that woman was the worst mistake of your life.” Thanks a lot, Cesare.

Recently, small strokes have started killing off chips of his brain, but not the ones that hate me for stealing his son. They’re hard-wired in. When my own father died of a cruel decline, Cesare offered only the most perfunctory of condolences. After all, his dry words said: What do Americans know about family? What do you know?

A spinal cord infection this winter left him with diapers, catheters and canes. Wobbly stick legs. A three year old talks rings around him. Apparently, I’m the dark source of all this, theft of son being a well-known cause of neurological decay.

This summer on the Adriatic we tactically ignored each other. Better silence than distain. A tough vacation, more like house arrest. On the last day, I’m sick from heat and headache, too much pasta eaten, too much bitterness breathed in that messy little house. I lie on the couch, wet towel over my eyes, while the others go to swim. Cesare stays home, a room away from me. I’m drifting off when a sudden shuffling flicks my ear. Canes clatter. I hear a grunted, “Cazzo,” his favorite male organ expletive, and then again, “Cazzo.” Before I’m fully awake, before I know why, I’m pushing chairs aside, skirting a table. Cesare lies on the floor, helpless. “I’m sorry,” he says over and over. I didn’t know how to lift a large handicapped man. We sweat and swear. I drag him to a door jamb, brace him, lift, his knee gives. When he’s finally in a chair, we’re both panting. I bring water and biscotti. Afraid he’ll pass out, I keep him talking. Finally his wife returns. “Our daughter-in-law saved me! Thank her!” Cesare shouts. “You have to thank her!” He repeats the story until it emerges that I was actually at his side before his head touched the ground, that I cushioned him. “She flew through the air to save me!” Cesare swears to my husband.

The fact is, Dad, it was you I was thinking of in that long fight for the chair, how achingly far I lived from you, too far to catch or help you as I longed to. I hope it’s enough that once I flew, defying gravity to stay another man’s inevitable hard fall.