DROWNING

a novel by

John Palcewski

Les meilleurs nageurs se noient.

--Les Liaisons Dangereuses

1.

“Don’t worry,” Dr. Veronica said, rapidly scribbling in Maria’s chart. “It sounds much worse than it really is.”

The diagnosis was dysplasia, Latin for “bad form.” An extremely common growth on the lower cervix. Every year, nearly a million women in the United States get it. In most cases the abnormality goes away without treatment. A small fraction of cases, however, progress to cervical carcinoma.

Maria was trembling and numb from the robotic rape of the stainless steel speculum, which had spread her insides apart, and from the matter-of-fact indifference of Dr. Veronica as she peered through the binocular microscope. The cervical examination was a wholly alien experience, and she was struck by how much it had appeared to bore that scribbling doctor. Ho, hum. You see one, you’ve seen them all.

“Is it cancer?” Maria said as she pulled on her skirt.

“No, no, you don’t have cancer, sweetie, but just to make sure we’ll be aggressive and remove it. A routine procedure. You’ll be in and out of the clinic the same day.”

“There’s always risk in surgery, right?”

“As there is in crossing the street, or taking a bath. In this case, its minimal.”

This had been a drawn-out thing, with plenty of time for paranoia to set in. Maria had felt pain way deep inside, finally forced herself to make an appointment. Then all the questions, and the drawing of blood. Then the results. Dr. Veronica had said Maria had an abnormal white count. And Maria remembered cousins, aunts, and uncles who got that diagnosis and ended up bald-headed after chemo, lying in the hospital bed for weeks and weeks before they finally died. Easy enough for her sister to say, hey, Maria, don't worry. You’ll be OK. Yeah, right.

After saying something was wrong with her white count, Dr. Veronica had not bothered to explain further. Apparently she mistook Maria’s hesitancy and shyness for stupidity, so she impatiently dismissed the little dummy and moved on to more important matters. Dr. Veronica was such a busy woman, such an important woman at that big hospital, and by contrast Maria was so clearly insignificant.

Abnormal white count. Something ominous about it, extremely frightening. Maria had not wanted to know. But then yes, she needed to know, of course she did. But no, no, NO, she’d heard enough already. The very next casually uttered sentence just might turn out to be unbearable. So Maria just sat there passively, unable to process all the horribly intrusive information that flooded her brain. It was an assault, an invasion, like a criminal who breaks down the door of your house and enters shouting and waving a gun. Suddenly, this evil stranger takes over and there is nothing you can do, not even scream.

Who said that we humans all are on death row, and we watch as the others are taken away, one after another, to be executed? Soon it will be our turn. Pray? For what? They say that the most effective prayer is one that says, “Thy will, not mine, be done.” God will do precisely what He, She or It pleases. So what’s the point in saying the obvious?

Okay, yes. I suppose there is a point in letting God know that you have already surrendered. You no longer think you can DO anything, which shows you have finally understood the reality of your situation. I suppose it’s better to keep God happy rather than annoyed with you.

“Maria?”

Maria blinked, looked up. “Yes?”

“Thought we lost you for a second. Anyway, you’re a bleeder, so it would be a good idea to get a backup supply of blood. Just in case.”

“Where would I get it?”

“Well, the best donor would be either one of your parents, depending upon their blood type. So why don’t you give them a call and ask them to come in? I’ll schedule you for the 16th, four weeks from now.”

A few days later Maria came to my apartment from her house in Long Island. She settled into the couch. She had that look. I asked her if she’d like something to eat, maybe some soup, or hot tea. But she wasn’t hungry. And in a listless voice she said she didn’t feel much like talking. It was an Italian thing. Parlare è d'argento, silenzio è dorato. Speech is silver, silence is golden.

“I hate doctors,” she said, “and I hate operations.”

“I know.”

“Am I dying?” she asked. The tremor in her voice and the look on her face broke my heart.

“Did the doctor say you were?”

“No.”

“Then you aren’t dying. You are going to be OK.”

“She’d have to tell me if I was, right?”

“Absolutely.”

“I mean, she wouldn’t keep that kind of information from me, would she?”

“No. That would be unprofessional and unethical.”

“So I’m going to be all right?”

“No question about it. But you should be thinking of what comes afterward. Recovering. And then us picking up where we left off. You have to come here more often.”

“That’s what you always say.”

“Yep. Beckett said I may have many faults, but changing my tune isn’t among them.”

I thought that might bring a smile to her face, but it was as if she hadn’t heard it.

Silence.

“I’m about to cry, and I don’t know why,” she said.

I pulled her close, and she rested her head in the crook of my neck. I rubbed her back gently.

“Well, again your doctor said it wasn’t cancer. So you will have surgery, and you’ll recover, and then we’ll pretend the whole thing never happened.”

After a while she dialed her parents’ West Palm Beach number. Giovanni answered. She explained what Dr. Veronica had told her during the examination.

“So I need you and mom to fly up here and do what she wants, okay?”

But her father said nothing.

“Hello? Hello? Are you still there?”

Maria heard a loud clatter, and then the line went dead. She redialed.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“I can’t give you my blood,” Giovanni replied.

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you, and that’s it. Don’t press me.”

“Put mom on the phone.”

“She can’t give you blood, either.”

“I just don’t understand what you’re saying.”

Giovanni hung up.

Maria covered her face with her hands. How could a father—especially a southern Italian father—refuse such a request from his favorite daughter, his own flesh and blood? It was an unthinkable, unspeakable betrayal. I put my arm over her shoulder, and again tried hard to comfort her.

“Maybe he’s got some kind of medical problem,” I said.

“No, that’s not it. If he has, we’d all know about it.”

“How about your mother?”

“She’s fine. So what’s going on here?”

Ah. There was a simple explanation that perfectly fit all the facts.

“You must have been adopted,” I said.

She gave me a hard, cold stare. “How can you SAY such an awful thing?”

“What else could it be?” I replied.

2.

Giovanni and Restituta flew up from West Palm Beach. Francesca, Maria’s plump younger sister, came from her place in New Jersey. Followed by Maria’s aunt on her father’s side, Columba, from New Hope, Pennsylvania. Also Maria’s two brothers, their wives, along with her mother-in-law, plus two of that loud woman's joined-at-the-hip younger sisters. Maria’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Giancarlo—or Carl as he wished to be called—was working on a big remodeling contract in Manhattan, but his brother, Giuseppe, was there instead.

They brought with them a gaggle of little kids, who ran screaming from one room to the next, knocking over lamps, bumping into the TV, trooping out the back door and across the big yard, and back inside, stomping and whooping from room to room to knock things over again. Maria hated that insanity but no one objected, no, to them it was all so normal and pleasant and natural. If by some miracle there would be silence, they would blink and turn their heads and ask, WHAT’S WRONG?

Don Giovanni sat at the head of the dining room table. The women bustled in and out of the kitchen, bringing plates and bowls of zitti, farfalle, and penne with various sauces, four different species of broiled and fried fish, chicken cacciatore, lasagna, and a massive salad bowl of chopped tomatoes and fresh basil leaves picked an hour earlier from the garden out back, mixed with chunks of water buffalo mozzarella and topped with a sprinkling of the finest Italian extra virgin olive oil and sea salt and coarsely ground pepper. The old man ate slowly in silence while everyone babbled loudly as if nothing unusual was going on.

Finally Giovanni cleared his throat. They all got quiet. Yes, he finally said in a simple, sparse southern Italian dialect, the rumor that had rapidly spread through the family here in America and in Europe was true. His piccola principessa had indeed been adopted. It had taken place in a convent outside Napoli, shortly after Maria’s birth, in early February, 1964. He and Restituta intended to keep it a secret forever. They never imagined that it would ever come out, as it did a couple weeks ago on the phone. When Maria said she needed his blood, he was stunned. Which is why the receiver slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

From the beginning Giovanni took serious steps to ensure that the secret would never be revealed. He destroyed the documents he got from the convent in Napoli, and bribed the bureaucrats in the Municipo in Barano on Ischia to draw up a new birth certificate that listed him and Restituta as Maria’s biological parents. He told his wife this was a subject that would never be discussed again as long as they lived.

Meanwhile, hidden away in Restituta’s steamer trunk was a rag doll in an elegant linen and lace dress. Also a pair of baby shoes, and a gold necklace with a cross, all of which came with Maria when they picked her up. Restituta hadn’t planned to ever show those things to Maria or anyone else. But now…

Back in 1975, Giovanni got worried that some lawyer might show up and take his bright shining star away from him. So he made the big decision. He and the whole family would move to Long Island, outside New York City, where a large number of his relatives lived.   Restituta and the children may have been unwilling to move to a foreign country, but they had no choice but to obey the old man’s orders.

Meanwhile the people in Buonopane were surprised because this man did not need to leave Ischia for opportunities in America, as did so many others. After all, his was a wealthy family, and they lived in a huge villa hidden from view by stone walls and a big iron gate. He owned a great number of vineyards, which produced grapes for a wine that were served the best restaurants in Italy. A pale, subtle Bianco Superiore, which of course was labeled D.O.C., Denominazione di Origine Controllata, meaning that it met strict governmental standards of quality. They called Giovanni’s father uomo della banca, a man of the bank.

In Long Island Don Giovanni bought a big house, near those of other Ischian relatives. He knew in that insulated and secretive emigrant community, no outsiders would ever track them down. And he swore if any of “that woman’s” lawyers tried to take Maria back, well, “a lava of blood will flow through the streets.”

“That woman?” Maria said in English. “Who is she? And who is my real father?”

“He’s dead.”

“When did he die? What was his name? Where did he live?”

Giovanni did not reply.

“But my mother is still alive?”

Giovanni said nothing.

“Answer me!”

“I’ve already said too much.”

Maria looked at Francesca, who kept her eyes fixed on her plate. Why doesn’t my sister stick up for me? She wondered. Why doesn’t she say, “Papa, why don’t you tell Maria what she wants to know?”

Restituta, likewise, averted her gaze and said nothing in the awkward silence. She would never publicly cross her husband, rather she told him what to do only in private. It was clear Giovanni—until now—had favored Maria over her brothers and then her sister. Restituta knew Giovanni thought more of Maria than his own flesh and blood, and she knew why. But she would never speak of it.

Maria didn’t expect her sullen mother-in-law to be supportive. No, all that nasty woman ever did was criticize, complain, point out what a lousy wife Maria had turned out to be, and how hard her son Carl works seven days a week to provide her a big, beautiful house and a huge back yard with a big garden and a BMW and a wallet stuffed with credit cards. As for Maria’s two thick-skulled brothers, well, they would never dare cross their father, they were always under his thumb, they were good boys, they always did exactly what they were told.

Ernesto’s treating Maria as “special” had always provoked his wife to be cool and disapproving toward Maria. She would never oppose Ernesto, because finally—as the saying goes—the chickens had come home to roost. Now Maria was seen in a much different light. As a threat to Ernesto’s standing as the flawless leader of the clan. Now the ground beneath him was starting to crumble. They all were terrified at the prospect. So they did what comes automatically. They just said nothing, they stayed silent, and looked the other way. This crisis will fade all by itself in time, they thought. And then things would get right back to the way they were.

With a sudden hot flush of awareness she knew not a single one among that crowd would ever defend her. They all believed the old man was right in putting an end to the discussion. Enough had already been said.

“You lied to me all these years,” Maria said, tears suddenly welling. “And now you refuse to talk.”

Giovanni’s eyes narrowed, and he crossed his arms. “We raised you,” he said. “That’s all you need to know.”