“No!”
She actually pushed him away. When he tried to hold her, thinking this was some residual part of foreplay, she said No again and stood up. “You want to get laid, find another bimbo,” she said.
“Oh, Christ, Rose—”
“You hit it on the head. Christ, Rose. Yes.” She crossed the room and sat in a narrow chair. “Rose is a Catholic, Alan. Rose isn’t a virgin, but she sure wishes she was. For you, you sonofabitch.”
“Maybe we got here too fast,” he said. It had been a remarkable two days: like falling in love when you were a teenager, moon-eyed. He tried a bad joke: “I think it was running through that field of daisies in slow motion that did it.”
“Alan.” She leaned toward him. She started to cry.
“Don’t—”
“Oh, just let me.” She turned to look through the slit in the Venetian blind, tears oozing. She gave a single chuckle, wept some more. “I thought I was going to do it.” She chuckled again and blew her nose. “I was sure we were going to do it!” She closed the tissue into her fist. “But—” Her voice was thin, strangled. “I’ve fallen in love with you.” She laughed, looked at him. “In two days!” She started crying in earnest.
“Rose.” He tried to kneel in front of her; it was no good, awkward because of the narrow chair, which had arms that were in his way no matter how he tried to hold her. He had to stand again and then bend way over and hold her face. “Rose. I love you, too.”
“Not in two days!” she wailed.
“Yes—yes—”
“You just want to get my clothes off!”
“Yes, I do—no, not just that—yes, I want to go to bed, have sex, whatever you call it—But not if you don’t want to.”
She was holding his hands by then; now she used them to push him off a little. “I do want to. I’ve never wanted to so much in my life.”
Her eyes shimmered with tears. She blinked to rid herself of them, then laughed. The laugh touched him more even than the tears, and he said, “What do we do?”
She shook her head.
“No, tell me, Rose! Tell me—what happens? What happens next?”
Three times she started to speak, until finally she shook her head, stood up and kissed him. “Let’s get some coffee,” she said.
Four hours later, holding hands across a plastic tabletop, she said, “I’m going to go home and talk to somebody. That’s what I have to do next. Then I’ll tell you what I think we do.”
“I love you, Rose.”
She nodded slowly. “Yeah. I really believe you do.”
St Rose’s is a bastion of the Italian community of that part of Utica, New York. A few people in the neighborhood still speak Italian, although most families have been there for generations. There is an Italian museum; there are Italian bakeries; Italian restaurants are strung along Bleecker Street like beads. The first generation came to work on the canal and the railroads, then in the heavy industries that sprang up. Now the factories are empty, but the neighborhood goes on, and the little church seems eternal.
Opening the door to the sanctuary, Rose was carried back fifteen years: dampness and incense, furniture polish and flowers. Two women were ahead of her by the confessional. One glanced around and recognized her: a friend of her mother’s. She pulled a scarf over her head and sat down, away from them.
She thought about Alan.
One woman came out of the confessional and was praying.
Sin. It was impossible to keep from thinking about sin, being what she was, raised as she was; the Navy was not a very encouraging atmosphere for spirituality, and she had almost certainly thought more about altitude and approach angles than about sin, the last several years, but the idea was always there, like the earth when you flew. She envied people who had no religion; they would be in bed with him now, right this moment. Joy.
The other woman came out, waddled to the front of the church.
“Forgive me, Father—” Her sins were hardly spectacular—anger, envy, impiety.
“Can I talk to you, Father? A personal thing.”
“Wait after.”
Father Amato had been her priest all her childhood and adolescence. Confirmation, first communion. Old women loved him; young women practiced birth control and didn’t tell him and said privately he was a pompous asshole, and then took communion from him; men rolled their eyes. Still, if he walked into a restaurant on Bleecker Street, the whole place fell silent.
“So, Rose.” He had got older, fatter. His cassock still sounded like sandpaper on wood when he moved. He took her hand. “Have you come home?”
“Only for the weekend, Father.”
He sat next to her. “Your mother wants you should come home. I saw her last week. She misses you.”
“Father, I want some advice. I’ve met a guy. A man. Another officer. I love him. And no, he isn’t a Catholic, so don’t ask.”
“Did you make a complete confession?”
“Of course I did.”
He smiled. “Then you haven’t sinned that way, even though you say there’s love.”
“Not yet.”
“Rose!”
“What can I do?”
“You can marry him. After he has taken instruction.” He started to dither about conversion, souls. She wanted to scream. It was all the old bullshit.
“You are planning to have children, I hope.”
“Yes.” Not planning, wanting. Yes.
“Then we must plan where you will live, how you will have children, with God’s grace, while he is at sea.”
“Father, I’m in the Navy, too.”
“Yes, yes, yes, but that ends when you marry. To have a child—”
“It will not end when I marry! I love the Navy. It’s my career! I mean to be a success in it!”
“Rose, Rose, this is foolishness. Women are meant to be—”
“It is not foolishness, you—!” She stood. “I’ll have babies when I’m on shore duty. It can be done. I can do it!”
“Sit down.” He would have made a great senior chief, she thought—real authority. “Rose, sit down!”
She sat.
“Apologize to me.”
“I’m sorry, Father.”
“Have you told your mother?” He didn’t acknowledge her father’s existence: Father Amato and her father weren’t on speaking terms.
“Not yet.”
“My advice is, tell her tonight, then get your young man here. Does he know?”
“That I love him? I think so.”
“Does he know he’s going to marry you and be the father of your children, I mean.”
“Uh—not exactly.”
“Then you better propose to him real soon. That’s the way you women’s-libbers do it, isn’t it?” He tittered.
“How do you make a secure call?”
“I call on a payphone, ring twice, hang up.” Donnie Marengo’s voice was a sing-song. “I wait twenty seconds and I call again. Then I go to the phone at Arbutus and Pflaegler and wait at twenty minutes before each even hour. Jeez, Dad, we been over and over it!”
“And we’ll go over and over it until it’s like fucking breathing. This could be your life, Donnie.”
Donnie scowled. He as much as said, It isn’t what I want my life to be; it was in his posture, his set mouth.
Bonner put his hand on his son’s T-shirted shoulder. “You with me, kiddo?”
The young man nodded.
“Okay. We see each other and something’s wrong. How do you tell me?”
“I’m wearing a hat backward. Dad, for Christ’s sake, everybody wears his hat backward these days.”
“Not you or me. I’m wearing my old Orioles cap backward. What’s it mean?”
“You’re warning me off. Something’s wrong.” The young man made a face. “Dad, have you ever really done any of this Mickey-Mouse bullshit?”
Bonner, who was proud of the possession of such secrets, which made him feel like a special sort of man, said that of course he had, lots, Christ! He opened a beer and handed it to his son. “Okay?”
Donnie shrugged.
“What now?”
“This stuff makes me—” Donnie shrugged. “I’m not comfortable with it, Dad.”
“It makes you feel like a creep or something, right?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
“Donnie—I told you and told you. It’s all right. It’s like our own people we’re working for.” He had told his son that they were working for the Israelis. It was an honest lie, he thought, made for the kid’s own good. Donnie didn’t understand about countries and world affairs, that it was all bullshit, one was just like another. To Donnie, Israel was a good place, almost American. Well, let him think so.
“It’s just such bullshit,” the boy said. He smiled. “It’s a lot of stuff to memorize, Dad.” He made a face, laughed, swigged beer. “I’ll think every guy I see with a camera for the rest of my life is goddam James Bond. I’m either gonna laugh out loud or shit my pants if I ever have to do any of this stuff.”
“You just get it all straight in your head and do as your old man tells you.”
“I know, I know. Little joke. Okay? Little joke.”
“Okay, Athens. Tell me about Athens.”
“Oh, jeez—!”
“Come on, go through Athens and then we’ll hit the Corvette show. That’s why we’re here, right?”
Donnie looked disgusted and said something about its being bullshit if you needed cover to meet your own father.
“Athens,” Bonner said.
“Okay, okay.” His tone was that used by teenagers to express their sense of oppression by such burdens as being on time or eating nutritious food. “Athens. Kritikiou Street. I approach it from the north on Maimonides Street. Mind you, I don’t read Greek and I’ve never been to this place, but I’m supposed to find these streets somehow. Okay. Sure! Oh, yeah!”
“You take a taxi, and you got a Greek alphabet so you can puzzle out the street signs. I told you, next tour I’ll take some photos so you’ll have some help. Go on.”
Donnie mumbled very fast to himself, going over what he had just done, then said louder, “Maimonides Street. Okay. I turn right on to Kritikiou. Straight ahead I see a church about a block away, it looks like it’s in the middle of the street, actually a traffic island. I walk toward the church. Third building on my right there’s a stone, no a metal thing out in front near the curb, it’s like an old gatepost—What if they’ve torn it out by the time we use it?”
“They won’t. Keep going.”
“Keep the faith, baby. They won’t. Okay. This thing. I go to the street side of it, cars parked along the curb, I put a square in white adhesive tape at shoulder height. What if somebody sees me?”
“They never see you.”
“What if they do?”
“They think you know what you’re doing and they don’t.”
“Dad, if I saw a guy making a white square on a mailbox or something in Philly, I’d think it was really weird.”
“Yeah? What would you do?”
“I’d think it was weird.”
“So, big deal! They think it’s weird. You’re on a street in Athens, you think some Greek is going to come up to you and say, ‘Hey, asshole, wotta you do on my city?’ Come on.”
“I’d tell him it’s a joke.”
“You’d tell him nothing.”
“I’d tell him it was a secret sign to my girl, that’s what I’d do.”
Bonner looked angry, and then he looked resigned. He told himself Donnie’s attitude would change, in time. “Whatever,” he said. “Okay, you’re fine; you’re right on the location, you got the route and the sign. What does the sign mean?”
“‘Meet me.’”
“Where?”
“The—Adonai Café in Piraeus.”
“What’s Piraeus?”
“The port for Athens, about nine miles from downtown. I take a cab, but I tell him to take me to the Perikles Superbar; it’s two blocks away. I walk. I walk west and turn one street toward the water, which I can see, then left and there’s the Adonai Café. I sit outside.”
“When?”
“From quarter of seven p.m. to quarter after.”
“What if I don’t show?”
“I come back next day, same time.”
“What if I don’t come then?”
“I do it again the third day.”
“What if I don’t show then?”
“We meet at the next place on the list, depending on what the liberty ports are.”
Bonner nodded. He smiled. “That’s pretty good. You’re smart, Donnie. You got it a hell of a lot faster than I did. Now cut a groove in your brain for it, you know? Over and over, over and over. Hey?” He held his son’s shoulder, and Donnie, seeing them in the cheap motel mirror as if he were having a glimpse of a future, saw a suddenly old man leaning on him, and he was deeply touched. “Let’s go look at Vettes.”