THAT WAS THE WORLD my grandfather regaled me with in his stories, a sepia-toned past of Italian-American life. Some of his friends worked as bookies, or made careers as gamblers. A few were in the mob. One was a hit man. But above all, they were a hardworking class of bootstrapping immigrants, working tirelessly to drive stakes into their own plot of American soil. I reveled in Papa’s tales and never tired of hearing stories that I already knew verbatim. These stories made me want to become a writer.
Coming to grips with the fact that he was nearing the end of his life, I realized that I was missing critical information despite all the hours of recordings. I desperately wanted him to pass on some life lessons. I had interviewed hundreds of people over the course of my career, but no matter how many questions I asked or how I asked them, my grandfather tiptoed around the meat of his memory. I wanted him to bestow his wisdom on me. Wasn’t that the most valuable inheritance?
“So you guys must be leaving soon?” he said.
“Yeah, this Friday.”
“Oh, that’s wonderful, Robbie. Just wonderful. I’m so happy you guys are going.”
“Yeah, Papa, should be a hell of a trip. We’ll say hi to all your old cronies in the village,” I told him.
His dimples pinched his hollow cheeks. “San Donat,” he said, clipping the O as he always did. “Can’t believe you guys are going.”
“I know—it’s going to be something else.”
“And you’re biking?”
“Yep, from Florence.” Like most of us, Papa had long since given up trying to understand my father’s obsession with cycling—all the miles and crashes.
“You’ll take care of your father, won’t you?” he asked. “He’s not a young man anymore, you know.”
“I will. And we’ll get back here to tell you all about what we found in Italy.”
“That’d be nice,” he said. “I’d like that.”
I leaned forward on the couch, toward him. “Papa . . . what would you say is your greatest accomplishment?” The question seemed to take him aback.
“The family,” he finally said. “I’m proud of the family.”
I pushed a bit further. “What about it?”
“You know . . . I wasn’t the best husband . . . but I was a good father.”
“You were. Yes, you were.”
“I did my best to take care of everyone. You know, if your father needed anything. Or Uncle Joe, or Aunt Nancy and Jodi—if I had a few bucks, I gave it to them. I tried to help however I could. Doing work over at your father’s. I built that deck for Joe. When Nancy’s kids were sick in California, we tried to be there. And Jodi, living in the place in Brighton. I did my best.”
I could tell he wanted to move on, but I wanted more. “What would you say was your philosophy on being a good father?”
“I don’t know . . . I just did it,” he said. “I did my best to keep the family together. That’s what you need to do: keep the family together.”
“Keep the family together,” I repeated. I reached for his hand to shake. I tried to hold the moment in my mind, knowing that this could very well be the last time I saw him alive. I wanted to tell him just how much he meant to me. I wanted him to know that he represented everything it was to be a stand-up guy, a true patriarch in my mind. But I couldn’t. Papa hadn’t given up hope yet, and I wasn’t about to betray him by revealing that I already had.
CHAPTER 5
Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.
—Paul Theroux
We weren’t even across the Atlantic yet and Dad already looked like death. In the middle of our overnight flight to Florence, I woke up to find him pale and glistening in a cold sweat. He had his thumbs inside the waistband of his sweatpants, keeping the pressure off his abdomen. “What’s up?” I whispered.
“My stomach,” he groaned. “It’s acting up.”
Dad had suffered from these gastrointestinal attacks for about ten years now. A section of his large intestine becomes kinked, causing extreme nausea and excruciating pain. He was rushed to the emergency room several times over the years, but doctors couldn’t figure out exactly what caused these episodes and offered no long-term cure. Instead, my father was left to develop his own remedy for unkinking his intestine. He discovered that he could make the pain subside by lying in the fetal position and rocking back and forth. This would often take place on the kitchen floor or in the back hall of his hair salon. But many times these attacks seized him while he was on a long ride, forcing him to get off his bike to crawl behind a Dunkin’ Donuts or into an alley to lie down and rock in desperation.
Once he had to lie down in a graveyard. “A group of kids showed up,” he told me later, laughing. “Probably walking back from school or something . . . Scared the crap out of them for sure.” One could only imagine the deep psychological scarring of witnessing a stranger, decked out in full spandex, moaning and rolling in pain on top of somebody’s grave.
Now in the throes of a full-blown attack, Dad desperately needed to assume his rock-and-roll position. Without saying a word, he lifted the armrest between us, lowered his head into my lap, and began to rock. I scanned the plane. This must look absolutely insane, I thought. Here I am with some long-haired head bobbing in my lap in the middle of a transatlantic flight. Your mind didn’t need to be in the gutter to imagine the worst.
Slithering out of my seat, I let Dad’s head fall gently to the armrest, then retreated to the back of the plane. “May I have some water?” I asked the flight attendant, who was reading by an overhead light. She handed me a water-filled plastic cup and returned to her book. Sipping the lukewarm water, I watched my father’s unruly blond hair spill into the aisle as he rocked in what looked like delirious pain. Shit, I thought. Have I underestimated this whole thing? Could I really take care of him? My default setting was to assume things would magically work out, but what were the realities of our situation? I was totally winging it. I had no idea whether I was physically prepared to pedal the distance ahead. I’d never cycled more than fifty miles at a time, and I was embarking on this ride with little more than optimism fueling my tank.
THE PLANE TREMBLED AS it descended into bands of clouds that rose up like icebergs in the cerulean sky. The ground gradually came into view, a jigsaw puzzle of light green grass, dark green trees, and arid brown dirt. The landscape became more detailed during the descent, with the green blocks turning into vineyards dotted with perfectly placed cypress trees, obtuse triangles of red becoming towns of stucco roofs, and handsome villas sprouting prominently from the hilltops. Apart from one main highway, the landscape seemed removed from the twenty-first century, as if we had flown back in time. Ahead on the horizon, I spotted it, with the emerald-green Arno slithering through the stone city like a serpent.
“Yo, Dad, check it out . . . Florence.”
After disembarking, we didn’t have to wait for checked luggage because we simply didn’t have any. Everything for the next two weeks was strategically stuffed into two tiny backpacks little larger than a calzone. Each held a cycling kit, a light down jacket, a light rain jacket, two pairs of socks, and a toothbrush; our helmets hung from the packs’ straps. I also carried a saddlebag, which I planned to attach to the seat post of the rental bike to hold my camera, six spare tubes, patch kit, bike pump, extra battery pack, and two emergency sleeping bags, which, God willing, we’d never have to use.
For our time off the bike, we’d each packed