Here and Now

By Dolores Pala

Journalist Marisa Grimaldi, wife of an Italian painter and mother of three, is living a pleasantly chaotic life in Paris when she wins a prize that will take her back to her native New York for the first time in 15 years. She looks forward to a trip down memory lane – only to discover the city has considerably changed in that period, and mostly not for the better. In the meantime, the prize turns out to be fraught with controversy and plunges her at the center of a web of international intrigue. To further complicate matters, a love affair develops with a most unexpected partner.
Set in the 1980s with flashbacks to the 1960s, the novel explores the lifelong imprint that childhood leaves on us – from our parents, our friends, and our neighborhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663234537

Dolores Pala

Dolores Palá, née de Soto, was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She moved to Paris at the age of 20, married a Catalan sculptor, and still lives in France. She is the author of In Search of Mihailo, Trumpet for a Walled City (both Harper and Row) and other books.

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Dolores Pala.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

iUniverse

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.iuniverse.com

844-349-9409

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3449-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3453-7 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 01/07/2022

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

For Christy, again

Chapter 1

Let us consider how, relatively unaided, I set myself up for disaster. The case in point began on a leaden Saturday morning in November. The Paris sky, so beloved of poets and travel writers who can have but sketchy knowledge of it, hovered low in indecision: rain? hail? sleet? or just eternal sun?

All were possible. There had been a mini-postal strike for several weeks past, an undeclared war between authority and underpaid workers geared to wear out nerves more than to solve social iniquities; its main result was the arrival of letters in bunches, like moldy grapes too long on the vine. This Saturday’s batch lay on the white kitchen table in an unpromising little mound. The gas bill, the phone bill, nasty blue envelopes from the tax people, other blue ones from the gnomes at the Securité Sociale, long flat white envelopes from our bank announcing either a dwindling balance or an accrued overdraft.

I glanced away from the mound, mentally leaving all this to Carlo, who sat opposite me in his barber-pole, striped terry-cloth robe. The children had given it to him for his last birthday to wrest him from the Rembrandt-like, cast-off antiquity he had copped from his grandfather, wearing it in some form of Florentine ancestor-worship not quite shared by his family.

I picture us then. Carlo and Gina, our twelve- year-old daughter, seated at the round white table on the rue des Poètes in the 14th arrondissement, opening strike-maimed mail over a late Saturday breakfast. She is infinitely tender in this last breath of childhood, nestling braces of toasted bread in a linen napkin to keep them warm while refilling the toaster. Paddy, a fair beanpole at 18, dressed in something curious he picked up in Tunisia as though to heighten the truth that there will always be an unsightly dressing gown in our lives no matter what the efforts are to bring us into line; Paddy hovers about with a tea tray that I look at now with a tiny wrench of the heart. It had come from my Irish-Canadian grandmother’s house in Montreal first, then had served its time on West 85th Street at my mother’s table. It had finally fetched up here, its pewter chunkiness a part of my own life in its disjointed continuity. From the Montreal Bradfords to the del Monte’s of the Upper West Side and on to the Paris Rinaldis, in the time it takes to say the twentieth century.

I love it inordinately, its frilly handles on the creamer and sugar bowl, the flowery arabesques of the pot-bellied pot, the bumps and hollows in all four pieces whose falls and mishaps are known to me one by one. Hey, there’s a card from Riccardo! Gina exclaims, her roundish little girl’s face alight.

She adores her older brother who, nearly nine years her senior, has petted and cosseted her all her life.

She reads the card aloud. Firenze is firenzzing! Nona wants us to come for Christmas. Taking the night train home Saturday. See you Sunday morning. Don’t bother to meet me, I’ll take the Metro. Love, R.

She looks enquiringly at her father. Would you have met him? The train gets in at eight.

We are not early risers by nature. Carlo glances at Gina, tentatively makes a face of polite indecision." Paddy gives a barking, desultory laughter.

At that hour? Fat chance!

Prickly Paddy, the middle child, thrashing around in the pains of adolescence, a case book of all its ills.

I smile at him trying to unruffle his feathers. He does not smile back. Can we go? Can we? For Christmas with Nona? Please? Gina asks, her lovely brown eyes imploring.

Carlo and I glance at each other, both slightly fuzzy: though it is well after ten, we have not been roused by tea strong enough to clear the head, the mind, the lines of the rest of our lives.

Christmas plans loom up like unexplored precipices, too early in the day.

Pour, Carlo says to Paddy, who continues to putter about.

Paddy grimaces, looks superior.

I have poured. It’s right in front of you.

Carlo doesn’t answer, busies himself with milk and sugar and a piece of toast Gina sneaks out from her napkin nest, still keeping the others warm.

She butters it with a lifetime supply of chlolesterol and hands it to her father who sighs, eats and drinks, with his attention more on the stack of mail than on his second child’s prickliness or his baby’s loving care. He picks through the envelopes, frowns at one.

What is the American Society for Cultural Interchange? Here, it’s for you. And he reaches over to give it to me.

One of Mommy’s causes, Paddy guffaws.

Now that she’s won us the war in Vietnam, she’s into the free flow of everybody’s Kul-tchur!!

I am not, I retort feebly but he does not seem to hear.

I gaze at the boy, my curiosity piqued. Paddy looks alarmingly like my twin brother, Patrick, for whom he was named. Like Paddy, Patrick is tall and slim to the point of gauntness, very blond with straight hair that, even when it is freshly cut, falls down low on his forehead. Patrick has a long Spanish nose and a sharp Spanish chin, yet very blue Irish eyes.

Like Paddy. I, however, look nothing like my twin brother; I have never been thin to the point of anything. I am dark and have a sharp, turned-up nose. An Irish face in Spanish coloring, while Patrick’s is a Spanish face in Irish coloring. Our mother, Nora Cassidy, was red-headed.

She and our father, Lorenzo del Monte de Forcada, who came to New York from Colombia to be his country’s consul during the First World War and somehow never managed to find his way home again, produced (perhaps predictably) a rather peculiar set of twins.

When Patrick and I were small and our proud Mother walked us about in Central Park, the other ladies at the sandbox assumed that Patrick was her son and the pudgy little dark eyed girl was a charge she was paid to look after.

Those were Depression years; such arrangements were not unknown. And, Mamma would tell us, still amused years later, she knew half a dozen ladies in the Park who never quite swallowed the story about our being her twins. It takes a close look to get beyond the striking differences.

Yet geneticists take notice! My firstborn son looks exactly like me but has my twin’s disposition (clear, sparkling eyes, supremely analytical, he is astoundingly unflappable –the born Jesuit which, in fact, is what Patrick became.

While my second son resembles Patrick physically, he has my propensity for the dramatic, my temper ever close to the surface, my unerring eye for the wrong turn at the crossroads of decision and yet, thank God, a sense of humor and a flair for detecting the absurd that somehow makes it all bearable. I do not despair that Paddy will outgrow his adolescent thorns as I outgrew mine, but I am frequently impatient that he takes so long getting on with it.

Gina, our lovely girlchild, the very much wanted baby, the cuddly afterthought, however, is all Carlo Rinaldi. His brown eyes, not mine, his elegant Florentine mouth, his grace, his gentillesse. She came into the world with love streaming out of her eyes and nothing has altered her nature since.

I steal a glance at her at the breakfast table and feel as warm as the toast she coddles.

Bills, Carlo sighs, pouring a second cup of tea. He pronounces them beels. It always sounds worse.

Carlo is a painter. His canvases are stark and austere, bold swathes of darkness upon white. When I first met him, that very first rainy afternoon, he took me to his atelier. I stared at his paintings and, though shamefully ignorant of the plastic arts, I saw and blurted out the only words that came into my head: Intelligent anger. I surprised him. He confessed later that he wasn’t really interested in my judgement of his work for he had seen at a glance that I knew nothing whatsoever about painting but intelligent anger had thrown him and he said he suddenly felt wary of me. In that instant he had a flash of intuition that whatever would go on between us would be considerably trickier than the pleasant little fling between an Italian painter and an American student in Paris, which was all he had in mind when he followed me out of the Café de Flore into the rain of the Boulevard St. Germain and said in his fluent yet accented English, You’re American, aren’t you? Tell me, what’s new on MacDougal Street?

It was indeed serious. We have been married 22 years. On this particular morning, I look at him across the white table, surrounded by two of his children, reading a postcard from the third, a heap of commitments lying by his plate. His extreme good looks are not quite untouched by time, just mellowed. The creamy brown of the eyes under fine brows, the straight, elegant nose, the quality of the mouth suddenly raise a tingle within me. Even at breakfast. I smile, drink my tea. Carlo was the one right decision I made. Though God knows he resisted it at the time.

I cannot support a family, he protested, quite accurately, when I held out for the eternity that marriage presupposed.

Who cares? I answered, no doubt with a toss of the head. I can get a job. I’m good at getting jobs! I was 22. It was the Fifties. Paris was cheap still. But it was also poor. There were few jobs and many hurdles to be vaulted for the few there were. Such as working papers, damned near impossible for foreigners. But armed with the arrogant faith of youth and with my knowledge of how right I was, I did indeed get a job.

It would have taken more than a Florentine painter to withstand an Irish-Spanish New Yorker, his father, the venerable international jurist-cum-historian, Riccardo Rinaldi, murmured when I first met him, when Carlo brought me home.

Grandfather Riccardo became my instant ally. Carlo succumbed with scarcely a whimper. Today I watch my reluctant captive frown at the mail and I have to smile. The memory makes me feel like a big-game hunter and I enjoy the sensation.

Tell me, what’s in the letter? But I haven’t opened it yet. My mind is far away. I think of the early years of our marriage when the first two children came too quickly, when my salary, though munificent by the French standards of the time, stretched like a precarious rubber-band around all our lives – buying this old house (cheap), fixing it up (not cheap), caring and feeding all us and easing the strain of children had too early, putting up with au-pairs that my ever optimistic mother-in-law would dispatch to me from God knows what Tuscan village who would love the children, cook expertly, never steal, never leave us for other employers who live in apartments instead of the stair-ridden little house we had bought so lovingly, little pearls who would relieve me of the anguish of working eight hours a day and having to do the shopping and the cooking as well – but who never, not once, fulfilled the promise.

Either they didn’t love the babies or they pinched money outrageously or they got pregnant themselves or ran off with married men, leaving us to face irate leftover wives. We had gone through every domestic gauntlet imaginable in those early years, with my eyes closed tight against the reality of it, fearing at every turn to be crushed, wiped out, left gasping in the middle of a wreckage beyond repair.

My job? I was a reporter-editor in a two-person shoestring news agency that specialized in Central Europe. These were the Cold War years and I had a cold war job. I was a Balkans watcher, a digester of other newsmen’s views of Central Europe’s uneasy settling into the post-war immutability we now take for granted. I was also an on-the-spot reporter at its various eruptions. Hungary and Poland in that astonishing autumn of 1956 and then the squeals and squirming of East-West pulls and tugs afterwards.

The little agency I worked for had its headquarters in London. Our Paris bureau was its only continental offshoot.

In many ways I loved the job. I hadn’t intended to become a journalist; there had been vague notions of involving myself in the labor movement and I was in Paris on a Fulbright to do a Masters on Antonio Gramsci. The closest I got to that was Carlo’s grandfather, who had been a friend of Gramsci’s and who later wrote about him in a book of reminiscences, Tempo e Tempi.

But I grew quickly to enjoy being a reporter and I also took to Central Europe. What I did not take to was the tandem life I led, working and raising two children, keeping the reins (more or less) of a household, and being everything to everyone. And always on a shaky bank balance.

Carlo’s work was not the saleable kind. No well-meaning young married couple would buy a painting of his simply because it went with the sofa. His work does not go with sofas. He has always been a painter’s painter and a stringently uncompromising one. He sold, but never enough. In those early years, his exhibits would receive critical recognition, yet sales just about covered the expenses of framing.

I ponder now on the interesting fact that money entered my life with Carlo in a rather swashbuckling manner and, at the same time, with a snide nod to our Freudian friends, so did sex. Yet contrary to what might have been expected, each in its own way served to make us a team. The two of us together, a team against the world because of lack of money and because of a deeply valued love. We fought for one and grew in the other.

Solidarity based on a total sharing, fists raised, taking on the outside world and, somewhat breathlessly, holding onto each other for comfort. If we were as dissimilar in tastes and in background as anyone could hope for, we bridged the gaps with a singleness of purpose that, by the grace of God, saw us through.

You had a two-against-the world thing with your brother when you were kids, didn’t you? And now you have it with Carlo. You’ve found yourself another twin, my friend Sunny once said, assessing my marriage when hers was in the process of falling apart. I laughed her off at the time, but...

My job at the little news agency ambled along for a number of years, shooting me off to assignments on no notice at all, bolstering my ego on the one hand, driving me out of my domestic mind in the other, rankling me, pleasing me, staving off financial disaster, till the early sixties. And then one day it was bought up by a conglomerate, something nameless and multi-faceted and, poof, it was closed – someone else’s tax loss. From one day to the next.

It left my boss, a man close enough to retirement, feeling cheated and bitter, with no alternative but to return to the States. And it left me with a mortgage at a time when the journalism job market was next to nil. But I was still young enough to think that I could do anything. Still a believer in the invincibility of youth.

Looking back, I wasn’t all that wrong. Those working years had matured me considerably, done more than that. They had settled me in Paris (albeit somewhat reluctantly), they had given me a profession, but they had also deprived me of being a full-time mother. The two boys, each in his different way, resented the time I spent away from them and, predictably, demanded more of me than Gina ever has. Spikey conflicts, text-book situations of the working mother, unavoidable, ultimately without solution. Thus, when my little agency closed its doors, I did not feel panicky. I had enough severance pay to keep us in shape for at least a year.

No, I didn’t feel panicky, I felt sprung! Which says something about my own ability to read the future.

The first thing I did was to sit down and write a short story for, as I grew into being a journalist, I adopted many of the journalist’s conceits, including the inevitable one of wanting to write fiction if only one had the time. Now I suddenly had the time. My short story grew. It developed chapters, characters, a momentum of its own; pages tumbled out of my typewriter in chaotic enthusiasm. At first, it was formless, but over a period of a year and a half, it slimmed itself down, acquired a beginning and an end. It was a novel. I gave it a title, Gino. I typed it lovingly. A new pride, a new response to that open question of who and what I was emerged with the book. At first, the novel was rejected by publishers in London and New York but then, quirkishly, it was accepted. It came out. And it was an instant success. Oh, not the two-million-dollar paperback sort of success, but a damned respectable one, nevertheless. It was translated into 14 languages, bought by the movies, serialized in magazines, became a book club choice in England; it was even read over the radio chapter by chapter in Turkish.

The book’s success stunned us, for we had gone through my severance pay nest egg and were depending increasingly on what is known in the family as il miracolo, that last minute Hair-breath Harry salvation just as the bailiffs darken the horizon. Il miracolo, which has since become a way of life with us. And so we dropped our guards. Or, perhaps, were confirmed in the trust we should always have in who we were and what we were. One or the other.

Carlo received the first of a series of commissions to do murals (sometimes mosaics) to cover the frame-maker’s bills. We exulted! We took a trip to New York, all of us, to see my parents. Fortunately: for they were both to die within the next year. As though downhill had already set in those deaths, but we were too joyous to recognize it. And then we had Gina. We treated ourselves to a new baby!

My second novel did less well, though the reviews were more than satisfactory. It was a more ambitious book. The first had been a tender, understated story of a pair of unlikely lovers in Paris in the immediate postwar. It ended in unhappiness and resignation. It would appear, judging by the amount of letters I received from readers and from the sweep the book took, that almost everyone (except me) has a tragic first love tucked away at the back of his consciousness and Gino unlocked such doors, otherwise carefully hidden away. The identification with my characters in such unlikely places as Japan or Sweden or Rio de Janeiro was extraordinary. I would have thought that the second book, thrusting forward the question of roots as it did, centering on an American abroad – but one who sees all the warts on Notre Dame and the rust at the joints of the Eiffel Tower – questioning the tenets of the times’ on marriage, women’s roles in and out of careers, expediencies – would have touched other chords, perhaps more adult ones, in an equally large public. I was wrong. Good reviews, few sales. Not 14 translations, only 4. No serializations, no film sales. No one read it chapter by chapter on the radio in Turkish. No money.

Carlo’s murals and mosaics, his infrequent exhibits, his last-minute sales of a painting as the cliff was about to crumble beneath us, became our mainstay, our way of life. Translations of books, screenplays, articles, the odd journalism assignment, an interview here and there with a visiting Polish or Rumanian government leader on a state visit to Paris solicited by an American newspaper who wants just a little more than the wire services offer – stopgap miracolos, last-minute exercises in survival of a colorful nature. That is how it has been for some years.

I look around the breakfast table. We are a handsome family in our way. All the genes are there except the ones that go toward investment banking. Yet, paradoxically, my father’s family in Bogotà owns one of Latin America’s most important banks. That, however, remains the single gene we did not inherit. I marvel again at how the wheel turns.

Open your letter, come on, Carlo repeats. I look for it. It is buried under an issue of New York magazine, which a friend at home kindly subscribes me to, for she is touched by my chronic homesickness for New York and my ambivalence about being an American abroad. I think of my friend and bless her. It would be nicer now to curl up with the magazine and read about Bella Abzug’s latest jibe than my letter.

I have never heard of the American Society for Cultural Interchange and cannot imagine that it would have anything to say to me other than a plea for funds. With a jaundiced eye on the stack of bills by Carlo’s plate, I wince at the thought. Damn it, if I were in the States today, I’d be entitled to food stamps!

I open the letter. It begins with a dear Ms which is enough to make me want to put it away unread. Along with the letter, the envelope seems heavy with brochures or something. The envelope falls to the floor. I ignore it. No one reaches for it. It lies there.

Read it out loud, Carlo asks, seeking diversion from the blue envelopes and Paddy’s morning pout. Life in general.

Dear Ms. Rinaldi, I read, making a long zzz sound. We take pleasure in informing you that you are the recipient of our annual prize in the discernment of awards in the field of literature for your contribution to the cause of international understanding between artists and laymen. You will find enclosed a check for $5,000 and a return ticket Paris-New York, which I hope will permit you to attend our award ceremonies on November 15th at the Hotel McAlpin. This distinction is offered to you in small recompense for your work taken in the context of your two novels and collection of short stories, The Lady of the Bruges Canal, which depict Americans and their values living out their lives in Europe today. We feel that your oeuvre provides an outstanding example of cultural interchange in a spirit of confraternity and tolerance. In the name of the members of the jury and our board of directors, we conclude with our sincere best wishes for your future work.

As I read it my voice mirrors my increasing bewilderment.

Incredulous! It’s signed Laszlo Taylor, Secretary General.

I look up at Carlo, meet his astonished eyes. The Lady on the Bruges Canal came out last February. So far, it had sold 3,000 copies and my brother had written, somewhat somberly, that it was already being remaindered.

Laszlo Taylor, Carlo says, staring at me, the stare veering toward laughter. And we both break out into gales of laughter. Of course! He’s Hungarian! I laugh. Taylor equals Szabo. Laszlo Szabo! Five thousand dollars! Carlo flings the blue envelopes over his head, a rain of giant blue confetti flapping clumsily amid our mirth. The dog comes downstairs barking, cross at the noise that has interrupted his mid-morning nap, a crotchety Scottie and a sworn enemy of untoward noise.

Carlo and I remember the dozens of Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, Serbs, Romanians who had colored my Balkan-watching years. The florid language of the letter was a giveaway. I remember a stream of Hungarians loosed on the world once the floodgates of the Revolution had opened (only to close so tragically weeks after) in 1956. The flair for language, the charm, the talents, sometimes the deviousness. Laszlo Szabo? I wondered whether I might have known him. It is among the most common Hungarian names, a Magyar John Smith. I then linger on the concept of deviousness. Why me? Who could want what from me? My novels and the short stories are what they are, neither more nor less. A style, perhaps, a flair for times and places, a touch for people. Perhaps even a concern with values among individuals in their societies. But not Tolstoy. Nor were they political. Or experimental. Indeed, why me? And who is Laszlo Taylor?

You’re going to New York! Paddy cries out, suddenly coming to life. Unsure Paddy, all bristles, at odds with the selfishness of his age yet intrinsically more than generous.

Paddy who glowers at whatever Riccardo gets and sniffs at whatever Gina offers, the middle child constantly at war with the middle. You’re going! he repeats even louder, making the dog bark in reprimand. You haven’t been to what you still call home since Grandpa died - how many years? Come on! You’ve won the lottery! Who cares who Laszlo Whatsit is! You’re going home!

And of course, he was right. We laugh uproariously. Carlo rises like an animated barber pole and pulls me up from my chair.

He kisses me and waltzes me around the kitchen. The dog grumbles, moves over to Gina who picks him up. Mommie won a prize. Mommie’s going on a trip! Mommie’s going to her home!

And something in the way she said it, her home, as though it were an igloo or a wigwam, something faraway and unshared by her, makes me halt, makes me want to cry.

Carlo stops, picks up the envelope from the floor, takes out an airline ticket. When is the 15th? he blurts out, concerned that it might be beyond that now. The bloody mail strike probably kept this thing for a week, he says.

No, it’s the 6th today. And it was mailed on the 3rd, Paddy answers, taking over.

You’ll have to leave tomorrow, he says, all grown up, taking decisions for dithering parents, heading for the telephone. Carlo and I shrug shoulders at his aplomb; we let him get on with it. I leave you to them, I murmur. All three of them, all yours. He grins. Not displeased.

And thus the questions about Laszlo Taylor, all the questions I should have had sense enough to ask myself about him and the American Society for Cultural Interchange, all the skepticism I might have had the wit to show, lay about us like the remnants of our breakfast. The tip of my nose was a free trip to New York and a check for five thousand dollars. That is how I set myself up for disaster.

On the other hand, what kind of mind would it take to be so prescient as to withstand this amount of fate’s side swipes to the inner heart?

The McAlpin, Carlo? Do you know about the McAlpin? It was where my parents met.

Wow! Paddy breathed, his blue eyes wide. Go beat that!

The ensuing chaos was typical of us. Practical matters were dispensed with in seconds. Three thousand pays the mortgage off completely! Carlo says triumphantly. Do you realize that? The end of it! Never again. Another five hundred deals with the blue envelopes. The rest you can blow!

I stare back in horror. Blow $1500? Are you out of your mind? I wouldn’t know how to anymore! Look, I’ll stay with Sunny, eat at Nedicks, people will invite me, I’ll gorge at the McAlpin. I don’t need more than a couple of hundred, I’m not going to stay.

You’re going to stay as long as you like, Carlo answers.