Dear Glory,
Robert reminds me so much of my Sal. Your last letter poked and prodded at my memories of our first years together. (It seems the only things keeping me company lately are your letters and the past.)
I’m going to tell you a story about my husband. It’s about time you got introduced to him, isn’t it?
I was working as a waitress at the Mondlicht Café, a German restaurant, when I met Sal. He showed up at the lunch hour one day, and quickly became one of my regulars. After a few weeks, he asked me to go to the movies after my shift and I said yes.
I liked him. Sal isn’t a big man, but he is big on talking. That first date I don’t think either of us shut up until the movie started. He took my hand in the darkened theater, and it was cool and soft, not like the sweaty, calloused boys I was used to. At the end of the night he didn’t get the least bit fresh, only asked if he could take me on the town again.
We started seeing each other frequently. Sal took me to the Art Institute and the Oriental Theater, to Maxwell Street for ices and to the tailor shop on Western Avenue where his entire family worked. I was young, but my parents had both passed, and Sal’s mother and father welcomed me like a gift.
When Mama Vincenzo pulled me into the kitchen and said she wanted to teach me to make Sal’s favorite minestrone, I didn’t exactly need to be a genius to know what my beau had in mind. I begged off, saying I cooked enough in the restaurant. She smiled, a cryptic Mona Lisa smile, and I wondered just how much she understood about me.
A few nights later, a man sauntered into the restaurant and requested a table in my section. He didn’t have Sal’s thick, shiny hair or kind eyes, but his face had a quality I admired. I could tell he was sharp, not book-smart like Sal, but the kind of knowing that comes from looking at people, really looking at them, and seeing who they are and what they need and how far they’d go to get it. Another waitress mouthed the word gangster as she passed with her pot of coffee, but that didn’t bother me. Everyone was a criminal back then, to different degrees.
I approached with my order book and he waved it away. “Just a lemonade,” he said, staring at my name tag. “Marguerite, huh? I would have pegged you for a Madeline or Colette.”
I’m sure I blushed. I know I blushed.
I brought his drink and he nursed it, watching me as I moved around the room. At first it made me self-conscious, but then a whispery thrill traveled up my arms and legs, giving me goose bumps. I’d catch him looking, and by the end of the night I’d give it right back, staring at him as bold as a streetwalker.
We ended up behind the restaurant, kissing against the rough brick wall. He moved with the slow assurance of someone who always got what he wanted, but never took it for granted. I was hooked.
He returned the next night. And the next. I made excuses to Sal, lied to him without batting an eye.
After a week the man stopped coming in the restaurant. He waited for me in the shadows, smoking in the alley until the last customer paid his bill. My shifts passed so quickly, knowing he was out there, and knowing what we were going to do.
One night I told the manager I was sick and walked out the front door, away from the dark alley. I kept moving, not stopping until I got to Western Avenue. I went to the tailor shop and made up some story to excuse my disappearance. They welcomed me back. They’d worried about me.
I quit my waitressing job.
I learned to make the minestrone.
It wasn’t until many years later—after Toby was born, after the doctor told me I couldn’t have any more children, after all the many things a married couple suffer together, the things that bind more than a ring or a slip of paper, that Sal told me. He’d watched me leave with the man one night, watched us steal to the recesses of the alley, watched me walk out twenty minutes later with my hair a mess and stockings askew. And he took it as a test. He said he trusted me enough to make the right decision for myself. And he said that it was such a rare thing to find someone he trusted so completely, that he felt, crouching behind a Dumpster watching his girlfriend giving herself to a gangster, that if I chose him he would marry me.
He had faith, and thought enough of me to expect I’d walk away from this man. He also knew he would never really get close to me if he forced my hand.
Since that one time, I’ve never been unfaithful to Sal. I worry, though, that he was wrong about me, and my fidelity has more to do with his proximity than some kind of inner moral compass. To this day I don’t know why I walked away from that man, only that I did. Maybe, as I said before, I’m not much of a cliff-jumper.
It’s funny. Bombs drop from the sky every day, chaos and mayhem spread over the globe, but we’re more afraid of the mines buried deep in our hearts, the ones we hope to never give cause to explode.
Love,
Rita
P.S. Give Robbie a kiss for me, or better yet, I’m sending some extra meat rations. A little iron will get some strong blood flowing through him in no time!