The Hour I First Believed. Wally Lamb
rolled my eyes recalling the incident. “The three stooges,” I said.
“And remember? She made us pull them up and burn them in front of her? And we all got stoned from the smoke—Lolly included.”
“She didn’t get stoned,” I said.
“The fuck she didn’t! I can still see her standing there, scowling at first and then with that goofy grin on her face. She was toasted.”
“What I remember is that she didn’t rat us out to my grandfather,” I said. “Which is probably why we’re still alive.”
The comment dropped like a stone between us. One of the three of us wasn’t still alive. Rocco had died of leukemia in 1981.
“Aunt Lolly, man,” Alphonse said. “A buon anima.”
I asked him if he’d be one of her pallbearers.
“Sure I will,” he said. “Absolutely. Whatever you need. Hey, you gonna feed people after the service? Because if you want, we can make up sandwiches and do some pastry platters. Coffee and setups, too. I’ll get one of my girls to help out. What do you figure—somewhere around thirty or forty people?”
I shrugged. “What do I do—pay you by the head?”
“You don’t pay me anything. This will be on me.”
“No, no. I don’t want you to—”
“Shut up, Quirky. Don’t give me a hard time. Hey, you eat breakfast yet? Let me get you something.” He disappeared out front and came back with bagels, cream cheese, and coffees.
We sat and ate together. Talked Red Sox. Talked basketball: how sweet it had been when UConn beat Duke in the championship game. “Jim Calhoun is God!” Al declared. “Takes those street kids and molds them into NBA players.”
“With seven-figure incomes,” I said. “You and I should be so lucky.”
“Yeah, well, keep dreaming, Quirky. You never could play b’ball.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said, smiling. “Although, as I recall, you were more a master of the brick than the jump shot yourself.”
I asked him how his quest for the holy grail was going—if any hot prospects had shown up on eBay or in the Yellow Mustang Registry.
“Nah, nothing lately. It’s out there somewhere, though. One of these days, you wait and see. Some poor slob’s gonna kick the bucket and they’ll have an estate sale or something. And there it’ll be: my 1965 Phoenician Yellow sweetheart, all two hundred eighty-nine cubes of her.”
I took a sip of coffee. “Right,” I said. “That’ll probably happen right after monkeys fly out of your butt.”
He nodded, deadpan. “Kinda redefines the concept of going apeshit, doesn’t it?” I’d forgotten how funny Alphonse could be—how quick he was. Before his father had chained him to the bakery, he had talked about becoming a stand-up comic.
I asked him how his parents were doing. The Buzzis had always been good to me—treated me like family. In college, whenever they drove up to visit Rocco, Mrs. Buzzi always packed two care packages: one for him, one for me. Grinders heavy with meat and cheese and wrapped in tinfoil, Italian cookies, packs of gum, three-packs of underwear and athletic socks. My mother sent me clippings from the Daily Record—bad news, mostly, about kids I’d gone to school with. She was too nervous, she said, to drive in Boston traffic. “Here,” Mrs. Buzzi would say, shoving a ten-dollar bill at me at the end of their visit. And when I’d put up a show of resistance, she’d say, “Come on! Take it! Don’t make me mad!” and stuff it into my shirt pocket.
Rocco’s death had wiped out Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi. Of their two sons, he had been the favorite, the superstar: their college and law school graduate, their young lawyer with a fiancée in medical school. That Rocco’s intended was an Italian girl had been the cherry atop the sundae. Alphonse, on the other hand, had been the family’s baker-designee—the crab his parents had never let crawl out of the bucket. I’d stayed in touch with the Buzzis—called them from time to time, sent them cards, stopped in with a little something around the holidays. After they retired and moved down to Florida, I’d more or less let them go.
“I call them down in Boca maybe three, four times a week,” Alphonse said. “Still fighting like Heckle and Jeckle, so I guess they’re okay. Last week, Ma gets on the phone and she’s honked off at my father. Hasn’t spoken to him for two days because, when they were watching TV and the Victoria’s Secret commercial came on, she told him to look away and he wouldn’t.” He launched into a dead-on imitation of his mother. “And you know what that louse had the nerve to say to me, Alphonso? That I was just jealous. Ha! That’s a laugh! Why should I be jealous of a bunch of skinny puttane parading around in their underclothes?”
I laughed. “How old are they now?” I asked.
“Ma’s seventy-eight, Pop’s eighty-five. Of course, every time he gets on the phone, I get the third degree about the business. Has to point out all the things I’m doing wrong. We been selling these bagels for a couple years now, okay? Dunkin’ Donuts sells bagels, Stop & Shop sells bagels, so we gotta sell them. My pop still hasn’t forgiven me for it. ‘You’re running an Italian bakery, Alfonso. Since when does an Italian bakery sell Jew rolls?’ ‘Since I’m out of them by noontime,’ I tell him. ‘Yeah? Well you listen to me, Mr. Smarty Pants. When people come into an Italian bakery, they want rum cakes, il pastaciotto, Napoleani.’ Yeah, his generation maybe. But all those old spaghetti benders are either dead or down in Florida where they are.”
“What this place needs is another miracle,” I said, pointing toward Mrs. Buzzi’s statue of the Blessed Virgin on top of the refrigerator. Back in the days when that statue had enjoyed more prominent placement in the window out front, a rusty red liquid of undetermined composition had, inexplicably, begun dripping from Mary’s painted eyes. The Vietnam War had taken its toll by then, and when Mrs. Buzzi placed a white dishcloth beneath the statue, the “blood” stain that seeped into it had shaped itself into a map of that ravaged country. And so the Mama Mia, for a time, had become a tourist attraction, visited by the faithful and the media. Business had spiked as a result, particularly after Good Morning America came calling. A yellowing newspaper photo of then-host David Hartman, his arms around Mr. and Mrs. Buzzi, was still Scotch-taped to the back of the cash register out front. I’d spotted it on my way in.
“Hey, tell me about how I need a miracle,” Alphonse sighed. “You know what the wholesalers are getting for almond paste these days?”
“Can’t say that I’ve been keeping up with that one,” I said.
“Yeah, and you don’t want to know either. But hey, it’s a mute point. The only Italian product we move these days are cannoli and sheet pizza.”
“Moot point,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s moot point. You said mute point.”
“Fuck you, Quirky. I already passed English, okay?”
“Just barely,” I reminded him. “In summer school.”
“And that was only because I used to bring doughnuts to class and crack up Miss Mish: remember her? She was pretty hot for a teacher, except for those sequoia legs. By the way, what do you think of these?”
“The bagels?” I said. “They’re good.”
He shrugged. “They’re okay. Nothing to write home about. We get ’em from U.S. Foods and bake ’em frozen. Takes ten minutes, but they go out the door, you know? The thing my old man doesn’t understand is that you gotta swim with the sharks these days. He never had to compete with the grocery chains and Dunkin’ Donuts the way I do now. And if Krispy Kreme comes north? Orget-it fay. I’ll just hang the white flag out front and lock the door.”
“Orget-it fay?” I said.
“Yeah?