left on the kitchen counter. Once she had forgotten to put the groceries away, and when she came back a week later they were still there, the meat and vegetables giving off a sweet dead smell, the milk and butter high as Gorgonzola cheese. It seemed safer and more proper to dump all the stuff in the can at the end of the drive than to ask her grandfather for an explanation. She knew of no monosyllabic explanation for such a thing, and was sure no polysyllabic explanation would be forthcoming. Her grandfather Mazza preferred contemplation to conversation.
In fact her two grandfathers would have been a perfect match—one a talker, the other a listener—except that they would have had complete disdain for each other’s background, work, family and character. No one seemed to find it odd that they had never met.
Angelo Mazza was a small man, very elegant, who always wore a white shirt buttoned to the top button and a pair of beige or pale gray pants tailored by his brother-in-law, a pants maker. When he had arrived from Italy after the First World War, one of his cousins, who had come over earlier, had found him a position as the caretaker of Calvary Cemetery, a Catholic cemetery nearly on the border of Westchester County and the Bronx. Angelo had taken the job until something better came along, but nothing ever did. The job paid a very small salary, and provided him with a tiny stone cottage just within the cemetery gates: a living room, a small dining room, a kitchen, one bedroom downstairs and a very small one upstairs under the eaves. To make ends meet, his wife had taken the subway to the city, as they called Manhattan, to the garment district, where she had been a finisher for ladies’ lingerie.
There were some in his family who had thought Angelo would stay single all his life. He was a very private man, the eldest of five, all the other children girls; he had always had his own room, and his mother, who had been a widow almost as long as he could remember, treated him like a prince. But as soon as he had been old enough to grow a mustache his female relatives had been on him constantly, bringing this girl and that girl to the house, the poor young women turning red as they listened to the phony excuses about why they had shown up at this or that particular time. He was forty years old when he finally married: At a party at his sister Rose’s he had sat next to a young woman with fat black plaits crossed over her head and a face and shape both bovine. She spoke no English and knew no one at the party; she was a niece visiting a woman down the street, who had been invited merely from politeness because she was a young widow whose husband and two children had died in a flu epidemic in the countryside outside Milan. Angelo had been so moved by the widow’s discomfort and fear that he had sat beside her, not talking much, all afternoon, and had gone to her aunt’s to have coffee the next day. Three months later they were married.
His only child had once turned to him, after yet another quarrel with her mother about her clothes, her manner, her schoolwork, herself, and asked tearfully, “Why did you marry her?” Angelo had turned away, begun wiping the kitchen counter, then suddenly had turned back and, lifting his silvery head, said in Italian, “Because she needed someone.” “Why you?” Connie had screamed back, weeping, the tears falling onto the hands she held against her cheeks. “She needed someone like me,” said Angelo, and went outside to his rosebushes while his daughter sat at the head of the kitchen table and sobbed.
Maggie usually found her grandfather by the rosebushes, kneeling on a square of cotton fabric he kept in his tool closet especially for that purpose. He believed those who tried to tend plants standing up were doomed to failure. He would cultivate carefully around the roots, mix a handful of peat moss in the black topsoil, and occasionally allow his only granddaughter to help him. It saddened him that Maggie’s brothers did not seem interested, but secretly he thought of them as Irish children, children with no ties to the earth at all. Maggie he thought of as one of his people.