Leslie and Douglas give us a welcome-to-New-York party at their home in Brooklyn. We eat hummus with pomegranate seeds scattered over it, kibbeh, and Italian butter cookies. The Palestinian food comes from Bay Ridge and the cookies, from a venerable Italian bakery a few Brooklyn neighborhoods over. We drink fizzy scarlet Lambrusco, fall and summer together in each delicious slurp.
Friends appear from hither, thither, and yon. New ones, old ones, former classmates, former students. Beloved former students all grown-up are one of my favorite categories of people in my life, the greatest reward of a long teaching career. Ficre loved that I was a teacher, and always welcomed my students to our home.
Vincenzo and Alex come, with their two baby daughters. Vincenzo and Ficre loved each other. Vincenzo is the Sicilian husband of my friend Alex. Since Ficre died, the silly phrase “bromance” has come into fashion, and had it been current when he and Vincenzo met, Alex and I might have used it to describe the instantaneous pull our husbands felt to each other. Both artists, both soulful, both woman-worshipping monogamists, both aesthetes, both fixers and makers, both uncensored, both un-pretentious, both similarly self-effacing and similarly dramatic, both creatures of the nest, both passionate cooks and eaters.
We are seeing Vincenzo for the first time since Ficre’s death, as he was out of the country when that happened and he and Alex have had two girls back to back in the interval. Alex came to the funeral hugely pregnant and I remember the urge to protect her as I saw the sorrow on her face.
Bella! Vincenzo says, taking my face with both hands and kissing me in greeting, and I hug him and break contact quickly because I know if I linger for even a moment we will cry.
Eh, the boys are beautiful, amazing! he exclaims. I told them to move around, to stop sitting in their chairs like the aunties. He is large and funny, voluble and direct. The last time they came to visit us, he and Ficre lay on the ground under a flowering dogwood tree that Ficre had planted and drank their wine and laughed and talked in Italian, sometimes holding hands. Fratello this, fratello that. Bromance.
As they leave the party, Vincenzo is draped with his girl-babies, with their loose curls and pierced ears and confectionary dresses. Like Ficre, he is a Pied Piper with children. He grabs each boy by the scruff of the neck and kisses them hard on each cheek to say goodbye. I think, no one outside of the family has kissed my sons quite like that since their father died.
We loved Vincenzo the best, the boys say to me later as we do the excited post-mortem of the welcome party. He made us think of Daddy.