The Apprentice Lover Read Free Page A

when he had escaped his father’s massive shadow.
    Alessandro arrived in Luzerne County as a young man of twenty with nothing to his credit but an equally strong and recently acquired wife, Anna Rosa, whom he had married without the consent of her parents (because he was from the wilder, poorer south, she from the more respectable north). He had resisted the hard, ancestral voices that kept telling him he was really a peasant, and that he should not assume too much or reach too far. In the Old World, your caste was a given, an invisible stamp you wore on your forehead until death. Defiantly, Alessandro rose above his origins, conjuring Massolini Construction from a handful of tools and one employee—himself. It became the most visible company of its type in northeastern Pennsylvania. He erected schools and office buildings, hospitals, and strip malls from Carbondale and Hones-dale to Nanticoke and Pottsville. Many of the well-known buildings in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre had been his projects.
    And there was I, in a family video rewinding, being sucked back to ageographical and spiritual place my grandparents had never remotely wanted to revisit. “What happened a long time ago is over,” my grandfather said, resolutely, whenever I tried to pry loose memories of the Old Country. “This country is about what’s gonna happen next, not what did. What did doesn’t interest nobody around here.”
    I had my own memories to deal with, too. That I could never go back to Pennsylvania and live out Nicky’s life for him was clear; Columbia had made that impossible. Yet college life itself had become unbearable, a path to a preordained, professional future that felt like a heavy weight I had not yet tried to lift. I could not go forward or backward. What I needed was a fresh landscape, and the blank check of time unmeasured by parental or institutional expectations. I wanted a canvas where I could paint myself into the picture, adding or subtracting traits at will, a place where I had no former history from which I had to be absolved. And so I was sailing to Italy.
    They say you can’t remember pain, but I do. I remember exactly what it felt like to step from one life into another, self-consciously. To stand for hours on the deck of that old ship, in wind and rain, searching the eastern skyline and waiting, with an almost intolerable sense of anticipation, for the first glimmer of a fresh continent, its shadow on the faint blue horizon gradually becoming substance. For better or worse, strong personal winds drove me, and I had all sails open.

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    S omewhere between Amalfi and Capri, the sea turned indigo, depth piling on depth. The transition startled, and I imagined myself falling overboard, losing myself in the inky swirl. It seemed I had lost so much already, and what I had to gain was uncertain: the faint amber glow of an island in the distance, a possible mentor, a sense of myself as a writer, and some agency in a world where I was unable to control what happened to me. But these ambitions were hazy, clear only in the retrospective lens of three decades. What I really felt was a vague tingle in my stomach, a generalized fear of the unknown that mingled with a greedy anticipation, a feeling of windows flung open to experience.
    I spoke Italian poorly, the little I knew having been gleaned from conversations with my paternal grandparents, and they spoke with such a thick Neapolitan accent that I could hardly make myself understood in Rome, where I’d spent my first two weeks upon arrival. But I was a quick study, and with Latin spread beneath me like a safety net, I could fall only so far. My vocabulary grew with extravagant speed, spreading vines along an invisible trellis of syntax buried deep in my psyche. I listened intently to fellow passengers on the train from Rome to Salerno, and spoke in isolated bursts of colloquial phrases to fellow passengers on the bus to Amalfi, which I always