“Why not think bigger?”
“You want to take all the flyers?”
Nicky picked up the large cardboard posters advertising the show stacked on the table. “I’ll ask my uncle if we can put the posters on the cabs. We’re all over South Philly. I think that would get the word out faster.”
“You’d do that?”
Nicky nodded and tucked the posters under his arm. “I’ll see you Saturday night.” He pushed through the door.
Once Nicky was outside, Calla could hear him whistling. She heard the motor turn in the cab, followed by the crunch of the gravel as Nicky drove off. She flipped the switches in the light box, stepped outside the door, and fished for her ring of keys to lock it. The key clicked in the lock, and when it did, her heart broke. She couldn’t imagine closing the theater for good but she also was running out of ideas about how she might save it.
*
Nicky drove back to the garage slowly that night, taking his time. He needed to think about what he had learned in rehearsal before joining the family on Macaroni Night. His stomach growled. The thought of Aunt Jo, serving the spaghetti, lifting it with two long serving forks hot from the bowl, high in the air in a graceful movement like an orchestra conductor, made his mouth water. He yawned as he pulled into the garage and parked over the big red 4.
Peachy was sitting on the office steps wiping tears from her eyes. He jumped out of the cab.
“Are you all right?” Nicky said, running to her.
She looked up at him, her black eyes charcoal pits where her mascara had run. She looked like Theda Bara in a silent picture, forlorn, miserable, and all eyes. “Where were you?” She leaned toward him. “Beer breath. You’ve been drinking.”
“I had one beer.”
“We had an appointment at the bridal registry at Wanamaker’s tonight.”
“Oh, Peach, I’m so sorry! I forgot.”
“Nobody could find you. Not your aunt, your uncle, or the colored lady.” Peachy pointed up to the dispatch office. “Nobody knew where you were. Where were you?”
“I was at the theater.”
She put her head in her hands. “I thought they fired you.”
“I was cast in the play. I did pretty good the night you saw me and . . .”
Peachy cut him off. “You’re in the play?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t ask me?”
“It happened so fast.”
“I’ll bet.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t do this on purpose. I just forgot to tell you.”
“Nick, we got to register. Silverware. Glassware. Goblets. Linens. Folderol!”
“Honey, you know what you want. The Lady Carmine plates.”
“Carlyle.”
“Just sign up for it. What do you need me for?”
“I didn’t get engaged to do all of this alone. The point of engagement and marriage is to be one, to do everything together. That’s the joy of life. The merge! I want you to see the stuff—hold it in your hands, because that’s what you’ll be eating from and drinking out of and using in our home for the rest of your life.”
“But I trust your taste, Peach.”
“Fine.”
“I don’t understand why we even have to register at all. Just let people give us whatever they want.”
Peachy’s eyes bulged out of her head in disbelief. “Stop right there, Nicholas. We will have three hundred and fifty guests including Canadians who won’t know what to give us, and if we don’t pick the stuff ourselves, we’ll wind up with a pile of crapola from Woolworth’s! We will be lowballed with pressed glass when we deserve lead crystal! It happened to Rosemary DeCara when she didn’t register. She lives in house with a junkpile of dreck she didn’t pick. And she kicks herself to this day for not making the effort.”
“I’ll go with you tomorrow,” Nicky said wearily.
“You have to quit the play. You can’t work and have that hobby and be a fiancé. It’s too much.”
“Let me take you home.”
“I have my father’s car.”
“You’re in no condition to drive.”
“I can drive. I dried up. I wept like my aunt Shush who was put in an asylum because she couldn’t stop crying. Okay?”
“That was the aunt with the goiter?”
“Yeah. The one with the neck of a linebacker. I was so traumatized I imagined you bludgeoned on the side of the road like an animal, hairless and abandoned, dead, nothing left but the carcass and that got me through.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better, Peach.”
“I don’t want you to feel better. I want you to feel lousy, so this never happens again.”
“It won’t.”
“This is supposed to be the happiest time in my life.” Peachy threw up her hands. “And it’s been the bleakest. I walk in a vale of tears. Details eat away at my gut like carbolic acid. I can’t eat. And I can’t sleep, because I’m wondering about you. It’s been a black and dismal period. And you are not helping me, Nicholas Castone!” Peachy dabbed away the fresh tears.
“It will change, Peachy.”
“It had better.” She dried her tears with the handkerchief that was tucked in the cuff of her coat. The white linen square was covered in splotches of black mascara. “Because I am not going to live like this.”
“We won’t.”
“Kiss me.”
Nicky kissed Peachy and helped her to her feet. “Are you sure I can’t drive you home?”
“No, I’m okay. I’ll call you tomorrow with the reschedule.”
Nicky walked his fiancée out onto Montrose Street. He opened the door of the car, and she climbed in. She looked so small behind the wheel, with her tiny body and little hands. Even her head looked small. Her hat, a cluster of pink leaves, lay flat against her head. The hat had a green velvet stem protruding from the crown, which made Peachy’s head look like a hazelnut.
Nicky stood on the sidewalk for a long time after Peachy drove off, thinking about what he had done. It was true. He kept forgetting Peachy. What was happening to him? What was happening to them? And why wasn’t he putting Peachy first? She had never done anything but love him. Why wasn’t that enough?
*
The Palazzini women were gathered in the family kitchen preparing dinner while the baby Dominic IV pulled himself to stand in his playpen in the mudroom. Elsa checked on her son through the open door. Nonna, Jo’s mother, was asleep in a rocking chair under an afghan in the dining room. Elsa looked in on her before turning back to the stove.
As the Palazzini boys married, their wives folded into life inside 810 Montrose Street under the direction of Aunt Jo, who did her best to make them feel at home but was also clear that they had a stake in it, therefore the girls had responsibilities. Elsa, Mabel, and Lena had to cook, clean, garden, and do laundry for their husbands and themselves, as well as pitch in with the family meals.