From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(47)

I felt an intense relief that this was finally happening. But I also felt hyperaware of my every move. I was self-conscious about my Italian, my open displays of affection with Saro, even my choice of clothes: jeans, with a midriff-baring top. I wore a sweater to cover myself the whole way through dinner. I had never imagined that what they thought of me would matter. But it did.

Saro and his parents chatted in dialect; I caught fragments of what they were discussing. Saro turned to me periodically to translate. I held his hand under the table. I talked to Cosimo, seated on the other side of me, about the number of siblings I had, where my parents lived, the names of TV shows I had been on. When I wasn’t making small talk with him, I focused on the two sweet young girls who were my new nieces. They were both under the age of five, and I could speak to them freely without worrying if I was using the wrong verb tense or using a masculine article with a noun when I should have used the feminine.

As we passed bread, no one referenced the previous years. There was no grand apology or even gesture of regret for time lost. We just ate and carried forward as if starting our relationship from that moment.

I ate pasta with local capers and a simple tomato sauce that pleased my palate like no other. I gorged on eggplant caponata and grilled artichokes topped with sprinkles of fresh mint. I had after-dinner espresso at his father’s urging despite having recently discovered that it wrecked any chance of my having a good night’s sleep. I willingly removed any obstacles that would come between me and this tentative Sicilian bonding session. I even bypassed my aversion to grain alcohol to take a sip of pear grappa. I wanted everyone around me to feel at ease. I knew I could never be one of them, but I could be the kind of wife who supported her husband’s making amends with his people. That much I had proven. And it made me quietly triumphant, optimistic even. We had done it.



* * *



Back in L.A., I pulled a cake out of my suitcase. The cake from Polizzi we had carried across three continents. Pino had told us it was dry cake and could be kept wrapped and unrefrigerated for up to ten days. He assured us that once in Vincent’s hands in Los Angeles, Vincent would know what to do with it. Something about a liqueur that could be poured onto it or about it being like a panforte or an American fruit cake, neither of which I had tasted or held much appeal. So Saro became the cake’s custodian while I balked at the extra encumbrance when we boarded a train in Fez. I had pushed it to the back of our hotel room closet in Marrakesh. In my mind, there was just no way that cake would ever set foot on US soil. There was no way the acclaimed actor Vincent Schiavelli would ever eat a dessert brought to him by complete strangers.

We had barely finished handing over our customs form after landing in Los Angeles before Saro asked me, “So how are you going to get in touch with Vincent?” He asked it with a whiff of challenge, as if he had done his part and now it was my turn.

I let two days go by; then I called my agent to ask about Vincent Schiavelli’s agent with what I am sure sounded like a convoluted story about a cake and connection to Sicily.

Thirty minutes later, my jaw dropped when Vincent Schiavelli called our home phone. Two hours later, the actor was standing in our one-bedroom apartment, wearing round wire-framed spectacles and a pastel linen jacket on his six foot–plus frame.

“This is perfect, I am having a dinner party later tonight. This will make a delicious dessert.” He was delighted, beaming with incredulous joy that he was about to share a taste of his beloved ancestral land with his closest friends. That a stranger had taken the time to bring him cake.

We made small talk about where exactly in Sicily Saro was from, how long he had been in the States, how we had come to have the cake, how Pino had known to give it to us. I didn’t mention that I was an actor, too, which, in Pino’s world, meant that naturally Vincent and I were colleagues and would know each other. After fifteen minutes, I snapped a picture of Saro, Schiavelli, and The Cake just before Vincent sauntered down our steps and back into his own life.

Saro and I told that story for years. He used it as evidence of the tenacity and determination of his people. He used it as a way of educating Americans on what it means to hold on to a piece of yourself when you straddle two cultures, calling two lands home. Each time he told it, he referred to the protagonist in the story not as himself but as “Schiavelli’s cake.” The cake was the connective tissue that had brought a Hollywood star into an immigrant’s home. That’s how he saw the story. I saw the story as emblematic of the way Sicily made me see how home is a place we carry with us in our hearts.

The story he rarely told was the one of his father, the family strife, and our exile. That story was harder to tell because it was hard to live. And for years, the renewed connection with his parents felt as fragile as parchment near a flame. When we did eventually visit Saro’s childhood home for a vacation, then a family wedding and later a first Communion, I slept under Croce and Giuseppe’s roof as a guest content to pass the time conversing as little as possible, being unobtrusive, burying my face in a book until the trip was over. I respected Saro’s parents for the change they were willing to undergo. Many people never achieve that in a lifetime. But in truth, I also never expected to be close to them. The most I hoped for was a delicate reconciliation and civilized mutual respect. I could now expect to be notified if someone were sick or if there was illness. Little did I know that we would be the ones bearing ominous news.