Oliver's Story

'Look, Philip, what I do when I'm alone is my own business.'

'Who denies it? But you're not alone tonight. So you and I are gonna make the social scene.'

'The what?'

'I didn't buy this fancy jacket — which you haven't complimented, by the way — to watch some lousy film. I didn't get this suave new haircut just to make you think I'm cute. We're gonna move and groove. We are gonna make new friends … '

'What kind?'

'The female kind. Come on, get fancied up.'

'I'm going to the movies, Phil.'

'The hell you are. Hey, look, I know you're out to win the Nobel Prize for suffering, but I will not allow it. Do you hear me? I will not allow it.'

He was fulminating now.

Oliver,' quoth Philip Cavilleri, now turned priest, S.J., 'I'm here to save your soul and save your ass. And you will heed me. Do you heed?'

'Yes, Father Philip. What precisely should I do?'

'Get married, Oliver.'

 

We buried Jenny early one December morning. Luckily, because a huge New England storm made snowy statues of the world by afternoon.

My parents asked me if I'd go back to Boston with them on the train. I declined politely as I could, insisting Philip needed me or he would crack. In truth it was the other way around. Since all my life. I'd been immured from human loss and hurt, I needed Phil to teach me how to grieve.

'Please be in touch,' said Father.

'Yes, I will.' I shook his hand and kissed my mother's cheek. The train departed northward.

At first the Cavilleri house was noisy. Relatives were loath to let the two of us alone. But one by one, they peeled away — for naturally they all had families to go to. Each in parting made Phil promise that he'd open up the shop and get to work. It's the only thing to do. He always nodded sort of yeah.

And finally we sat there, just the two of us. There wasn't any need to move, since everyone had stocked the kitchen with a month's supply of everything.

Now, with no distractions from the aunts or cousins, I began to feel the Novocaine of ceremony wearing off. Before I had imagined I was hurting. Now I knew that I'd been merely numb. The agony was just beginning.

'Hey, you oughta get back to New York,' said Phil without too much conviction. I spared him the rejoinder that: his bakery seemed rather closed. I said, 'I can't. I have a New Year's Eve date here in Cranston.'

'Who?' he asked.

'With you,' I answered.

'That'll be a lotta fun,' he said, 'but promise me — on New Year's morning you'll go home.'

'Okay,' I said.

'Okay,' he said.

My parents called up every evening.

'No, there's nothing, Mrs Barrett,' Phil would say to her. She'd obviously asked how she could help.

'No, nothing, Father,' I would say when my turn came. 'But thanks.'

Phil showed me secret pictures. Photos that were once forbidden me by Jenny's most adamant command.

'Goddammit, Phil, I don't want Oliver to see me with my braces on!'

'But, Jenny, you were very cute.'

'I'm cuter now,' she answered, very Jenny-like. Then added, 'And no baby pictures, either, Phil.'

'But why? Why not?'

'I don't want Oliver to see me fat.'

I'd watched this happy cannonade, bemused. By then we actually were married and I couldn't possibly divorce her on the grounds of braces past.

'Hey, who's boss here?' I'd remarked to Phil, to keep the action lively.

'Take a guess.' He smiled. And put the albums back unopened.

Now today we looked. There were a lot of photographs.

Prominent in all the early ones was 'T'resa' Cavilleri, Philip's wife.

'She looks like Jenny.'

'She was beautiful,' he sighed.

Somewhere after Jenny's baby fat but prior to her braces, T'resa disappeared completely from the pictures.

'I shoulda never let her drive at night,' said Phil, as if the accident in which she died had happened just the day before.

'How did you cope?' I asked. 'How could you bear it?' I had asked the question selfishly to hear what remedy he might suggest that could be balm for me.

'Who says that I could bear it?' Philip answered. 'But at least I had a little daughter … '

'To take care of … '

'To take care of me,' he said.

And I heard tales that in the life of Jennifer had been classified material. How she did everything to help him. And to ease his pain. He had to let her cook. But what was worse, he had to eat her early efforts, drawn (and quartered) from recipes in supermarket magazines. She forced him to keep up his Wednesday bowling-with-the-fellas nights. She tried her best to make him happy.

'Is that why you never married, Phil?'

'What?'

'Because of Jenny?'

'Christ, no. She pestered me to marry — even fixed me up!'

'She did?'

He nodded. 'Jeez, she must have tried to sell me every eligible Italo-American from Cranston to Pawtucket.'

'But all losers, huh?'

'No, some were nice,' he said. Which took me by surprise. 'Miss Rinaldi, Jenny's junior high school English teacher … '

'Yeah?' I said.

'Was very nice. We saw each other for a while. She's married now. Three kids.'

'You weren't ready, Phil, I guess.'

He looked at me and shook his head. 'Hey, Oliver — I had it once. And who the hell am I to hope that God will give me two of what most people never get at all.'

And then he sort of looked away, regretting his betrayal of that truth to me.

On New Year's Day he literally pushed me on a homeward train.

'Just remember that you promised to get back to work,' he said.

'You too,' I answered.

'It helps. Believe me, Oliver, it really helps.' And then the train began to move.