The Proxy Bride Read online

  Marcello Junior’s job is easy: he provides what Kowalchuck refers to as muscle. He’s the one to pry off and replace the rocker panels on the Impala, to stack and carry boxes carefully hidden in the storeroom under licorice pipes and mojos, and most importantly to deal with any guys who arrive at the store drunk and horny, expecting a free sample. Kowalchuck has provided him with a simple, cheap, easy-to-use weapon, a baseball bat, which so far he’s never had to swing at anyone. When the occasional craps player staggers in without sufficient cash, Marcello simply stands at the counter tapping the bat in his hand, making himself look big. Not difficult, at six-four. While he proves to be effective at intimidation, he’s never actually had to lay a hand on anyone – a good thing, since along with gambling and the as-yet-unconfessed carnal knowledge of Claudia Donato, physical violence would be another thing to bring up to his confessor, another sin to live down, or work off, or repent before he enters the seminary. For now, the money he makes safeguarding the store’s print merchandise is a means to an end: that’s how Marcello sees it, the goal being saving up for his novitiate fee so he can get the hell out of Shipman’s Corners.

  Marcello may have Senior’s tall, powerful build but everything else about him – his thickly-lashed eyes, curly hair, and sensuous mouth like a putto – must come from his shadowy mother. Not that he knows for sure, having never seen a picture of her. But a few broken images scratch at his memory: a woman’s hands briskly adjusting the ties of an apron; wet footprints next to his on a bare cement floor; a bready, warm presence beside him on the deck of a ship, the blue horizon rising and falling, falling and rising. His first solid, too-real-not-to-be-true memory of Canada is of himself holding Sofia’s hand in a train station, staring up at words, high as stars, chiselled in stone. A friendly man with a spectacular mustache walked them to a platform: Signore IIAS, Sofia called him. Mister Italian Immigrant Aid Society. He presented a sucker to Marcello and mussed his hair, saying Hey, paesano, you already got it made, your Pop owns a candy store!

  Marcello and his mother were part of a pattern repeated again and again on Canal Road: men arrived first, settled themselves, then sent for their families. They had only just joined Senior when an outbreak of infantile paralysis, also known as poliomyelitis, swept Shipman’s Corners. Polio was something you worried about with children but it bypassed Marcello and attacked Sofia. The doctor who came to the flat suggested that the stress of looking after the boy on the long journey might have predisposed her to the illness. Marcello can still remember Senior repeating these words in Italian, and looking down at him accusingly.

  She was rushed to the hospital and confined to an iron lung. To Marcello, her absence was a hole in time, a void that cuddled in bed beside him, chilly lips chanting words against his skin:

  Say the rosary and she’ll come home.

  Obey your father and she’ll come home.

  Do as you’re told and she’ll come home.

  Be a good little boy or she’ll die.

  Despite Marcello’s attempts to bargain with God, Sofia died on Dominion Day, 1955. He was five years old. Kneeling at a coffin that seemed to hold a giant doll, he was overwhelmed by a childishly simple explanation for his mother’s death:

  Sono stato cattivo. E culpa mia.

  I was bad. It’s my fault.

  Sofia vanished from his life like a rock dropped into a silent pool. Marcello’s only memento of her is the record player she brought with her across the ocean, as if music didn’t exist in Canada. Occasionally, at night, he heard it sing to him in his mother’s voice; eventually even that comfort trickled away, leaving him with the lingering sense that anyone he loves, and who dares to love him back, is doomed to die. It is the act of loving that kills them, as if love carries with it a kind of temptation, or pride, that God won’t tolerate. Real love is something you can only give to God. The punishment for loving someone other than God is to lose them to death. Marcello quietly believes this, something he has seen borne out several times in the passing of farm dogs.

  As everyone knows, a father can’t raise a child alone, especially one with a business to run. After a few too many trips to the hospital, where cuts from repeated slaps and punches from his grieving, grey-haired father were stitched and restitched, Marcello was sent to live with paesani of Senior’s, the Andolini family: not exactly close relatives, but something more than friends. They came from the same part of war-torn Italy as Senior, with the same untranslatable jokes and ridiculously operatic tales of grand passion, lost love, terrible betrayals and sudden death – all from back in the Old Country, of course; no one lived or loved with such heat in polite, law-abiding Canada.

  At the Andolini farm, Marcello was just one of many shouting, dark-haired boys, falling out of peach trees and fixing broken-down cars. There were so many kids that the Andolinis would hardly have even noticed Marcello, if not for his unusual height and odd interest in school. When he skipped a grade, one of the Andolini men observed: the trouble with Marcello is that he thinks too much.

  He visited his Pop once a month; the family matriarch, Prima, saw to that. He remembers those grim visits, stuck indoors with his father, poking at the bags of jujubes and peppermints and playing with the door of the freezer where expensive treats sat unbought, month after month, until they were covered with frost. “Hey, knock it off!” Senior would yell. “You’ll melt the goods!” Growing up, that was the longest conversation Marcello ever had with his father. If you can call it a conversation.

  On his sixteenth birthday, Marcello was told to pack up and go home: Senior had wrenched his back lifting a box of Cee Dee Rockets and needed a hand in the store. Prima figured the boy was strong enough to both pull his weight and stand up to his father. My conscience is clean, she said. Who’s gonna push around a kid that big?

  He drove himself home to Shipman’s Corners in his battered Chevy, carrying a few prized possessions: his mother’s record player and 78s; a hockey stick signed by Stan Mikita; and a framed photograph of Pope John XXIII – a gift from Prima, who was the first to encourage Marcello’s calling. Every family should give one child to the Church, she liked to say. One child, who would sacrifice himself to a life of celibacy and duty and love of God. As far as the Andolinis were concerned, Marcello was that child. It was the least the boy could do to thank the family for taking him in after his poor mother died.

  Now, with just a couple of months to go before he enters the Passionate Order of St. John Seminary across the lake in Toronto, Marcello is starting to feel as if the muggy, tedious Niagara summer will go on forever – until that day when the letter arrives from Italy and Senior shuffles back out of the storeroom, holding a sheet of airmail paper and two snapshots. He takes his son by the arm and does something he almost never does: he smiles. “I have something important to show you.”

  Senior places the snapshots on the counter. The first is of a short blonde woman in a lace veil and a wedding dress as stiff as meringue. The neckline sags a little, as if the bodice is too big for her. In one hand, she grips a trailing bouquet of roses and freesia; the other is tucked into the arm of a grey-haired man in a pinstriped suit – too old to be the groom, Marcello assumes he’s her father. Like the bride, he looks like he’s wearing someone else’s clothes. The suit jacket strains over his belly and the cuffs of his pants almost cover his shoes. The man is smiling. The bride is not.

  The second snapshot is a close-up of the same woman, taken at a table in what looks like an outdoor café. Her hair is scraped into a bun, showing off her huge blue eyes and delicate face, pale as a church angel. She smiles fetchingly, head tipped to one side, lips slightly parted. The pose looks disturbingly like that of a Cheer girl. Senior taps the woman’s face with his finger and stares at his son.

  “Who is she?” asks Marcello, feeling a sudden tightening in the front of his jeans. The woman is so gorgeous, she could be Miss Universe.

&n
bsp; “Her name is Ida,” says Senior. “Venetian. Junior, Ida is your new mother.”

  For a moment, Marcello wonders if his father is still drunk from the night before. “You’re going to marry her?”

  “We’re married already! By proxy. I find her through a marriage broker in the Old Country. Zio Carlo, there in the picture, he stand up for me at the church. And now I got all the paperwork to bring my wife here.”

  “Your wife?” The facts of the situation refuse to sink into Marcello’s head.

  “My wife, and your mamma. How about that?”

  “She looks awfully young,” says Marcello, staring at Ida’s face.

  “Thirty-four. That’s only ten years younger than me, give or take!” answers Senior, defensively.

  Thirty-four – Claudia’s age. Ida looks younger than that, but when it comes to women, Marcello knows you can’t trust your eyes. Females are talented shape-changers. Christie Hryhorchuck and the other neighbourhood girls know how to add years with a little lipstick, powder and mascara. He’s even seen drab canning factory girls all dolled up like movie stars to go out with their slaughterhouse-worker boyfriends. Ida can’t be as pretty or as young as she appears or she wouldn’t be marrying Senior. It stands to reason.

  “When you’re a man, what does age matter?” says Senior, pounding Marcello on the back. “It’s good to be a man. Wait ’til your new mother gets here!”

  Marcello holds up his hands, fending Senior off. “Hang on, Pop. She’s not my mother. I’m too old for mothering.”

  Senior’s smile disappears. He looks down at the photograph, tapping his finger again on Ida’s face. “You right. She show up in a couple weeks. Maybe you leave when she comes. Not right for you to be on the pullout couch while we in the bedroom, know what I mean?”

  Marcello stops what he’s doing and stares at his father in disbelief. “What you expect me to do, sleep in the back alley?”

  Senior shrugs. “It’ll be good for you. When you go to the missions with the priests, you ain’t gonna be sleeping in no comfortable bed.” And with that, Senior shuffles back into the storeroom, carrying the photo of his proxy bride and a fresh issue of Oggi, leaving his son to sweep sprinklings of sweetness from the rough wooden floor.

  2

  June 29

  The velvet curtains of the confessional are heavy with dust and shame. Marcello adjusts the chain on his scapular medal; maybe the crucifix is keeping his chest from scabbing over. Whatever the reason, the scratches from Claudia’s nails are still oozing blood.

  On the other side of the grillwork screen, the priest coughs lightly, peppermint mouthwash sweetening the stale air of the wooden confessional box. Marcello rouses himself to enumerate his failings.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been one month since my last confession and these are my sins: gambling, three-four times. Maybe five. And I beat a man, once. I didn’t want to, but there was no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.” The priest’s voice is low, so no one on the other side of the box can hear. “I heard you broke Jimmy’s nose.”

  “Just bloodied it. I might have cracked his ribs. He was trying to sneak out with our merchandise while I was restocking the storeroom.”

  “By ‘merchandise’, you mean those disgusting magazines. Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “Are you kidding? Scusi, Father, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but if I call the police, Pop and me go to jail.”

  Marcello can see the hands of a luminous watch dial through the grillwork screen: it’s ten past three. The priest must be sitting with his head resting on his fist, one ear toward Marcello, the other toward God. The priest shifts and sighs in the darkness. “Anything else?” His voice sounds a little weary.

  Marcello’s mouth tastes like dust. “Adultery. Once.” He searches his conscience, trying to find genuine remorse. Making a bad confession would be piling sin on sin. His one regret is his failure to stop Kowalchuck from pressuring Claudia to make good on her debt, the sex with Marcello being – in Kowalchuck’s view – her own damn fault. It’s as close as Marcello can get to penitence and he hopes God understands.

  “I’ll never do adultery again. For these and all the sins of my past life, I am heartily sorry.”

  To his relief, Father Ray mumbles an absolution, his luminous watch dial moonlike in the darkness as he moves his hand in blessing. But before Marcello can rise from the kneeler, the priest says: “I want to talk to you later.”

  Marcello pushes aside the curtain and steps into the stillness of St. Dismas Church, the only place where he sees evidence of the hand of God. Unlike the chaotic neighbourhood it serves, the interior of the church has a rational beauty that Marcello finds comforting. The apse is symmetrical, all stained glass and wood, the dome above the altar as elegant as the solution to a physics problem, the air – free of slaughterhouse smells – scented with lemon wax and a trace of incense from morning mass. In the choir loft, an organist is practicing Bach’s Air on a G String.

  He slides into a pew to pray – to God the Father, his favourite member of the Holy Trinity. The music helps his mind fly up to the loft and into the dome, away from his bloody chest and the tourniquet of guilt tightening inside his head. Aside from science books and craps games, the church is the only place where he can escape the void, that empty, windy nothingness that has slouched beside him since childhood.

  He usually feels washed clean after leaving the box, a feeling that stays with him on the walk home past the ugly stucco cottages and broken-down stoops and bunker-like storefronts, full of shell-shocked DPs who all come from somewhere else and don’t want to live in the purgatory of Canal Road any longer than they have to. But today, even after making confession, he feels less than pure. When did sin and forgiveness become so complicated?

  He kneels to say his penance: two Our Fathers, two Hail Marys. Kid stuff. He knows the real penance will come out of the box with Father Ray, who obviously isn’t buying his act of contrition for beating up Jimmy. True, there was a certain satisfaction in it: the guy staggered into the store drunk and told Marcello he’d shot a Wop who looked just like him in the War. When there’s trouble with guys like Jimmy, it’s usually about the War; in this neighbourhood, there’s always someone who used to be enemies with someone else. Twenty-five years ago they were training their gun sights on one another, now they’re supposed to be neighbourly. Jimmy particularly hates Italians, he says, first because they’re Catholics and second because they’re cowards – everybody knows that, he told Marcello, brandishing the stolen magazine in his fist. So yes, Marcello did need to nip the pilfering in the bud. But perhaps punching Jimmy in the face and then throwing him off the stoop held too much satisfaction in it. At least he didn’t hit him with the bat. Marcello is still thinking this over when Father Ray slides in beside him.

  “Two chairs, no waiting,” says the priest, with a small smile.

  “Hey, Father,” says Marcello, tensing up at Father Ray’s attempt to relax him with a joke. The priest is afraid of him now? He’s a Polish guy, a former star in Junior A hockey, young enough to be Marcello’s older brother. He grew up on the street.

  Father Ray rests his elbows on his knees and speaks in an undertone. “I’m not sure you’re serious about your calling.”

  Marcello closes his eyes: so he hasn’t been forgiven, after all. His chest is on fire but he’s almost enjoying the pain: it’s a distraction from the knowledge that he’s stuck in time, like Superman flying against the rotation of the earth. “Father, I’m dead serious about the seminary. I’d like to go even sooner than the fall. Pop is remarrying. I mean, he has remarried, a proxy bride from Italy. There isn’t room for all of us in the flat.”

  Father Ray puts his hand on Marcello’s shoulder. “I’ll see what I can do to speed things up. In the mean time, strive to live a more sai
ntly life.”

  Marcello returns to an empty store – empty of Pop, that is, who is making a smuggling run over the border for Kowalchuck. At the magazine rack, Christie Hryhorchuck and the Donato twins are thumbing through Mademoiselle and Miss Chatelaine with Scripto-stained fingers. Senior has said to never let the girls touch them without paying first – This ain’t a library – but Marcello ignores his father’s orders. It’s not like the girls are abusing anything serious like Popular Science. Besides, they keep Marcello company while he’s filling time rebuilding his mother’s old phonograph or playing chess, usually against himself. Marcello White versus Marcello Black.

  Taking his place behind the counter, he tries not to stare at Judy and Jane Donato, miniature versions of Claudia. The girls are dressed for a majorette competition in white tasseled boots, fringed halter-tops and spangled shorts. He’s sure their mother wouldn’t have breathed a word to them. For his part, Marcello talked to Kowalchuck, explaining that, as far as Claudia was concerned, her debt – her husband Al’s debt, it turns out – had been settled. Basta. Enough.

  Kowalchuck laughed and said that Marcello should thank him for letting him have one on the house. When Marcello insisted that Claudia’s feelings be respected, Kowalchuck’s voice grew cold. He told Marcello to mind his own business. He might even decide to drop in on Claudia himself, he said. Al Donato had a weakness for slow horses and owed him big-time. Hanging up the phone, Marcello noticed blood soaking through his shirt: he taped the scratches on his chest and tried to forget his promise to Claudia.