Audrey Hepburn's Pearls: Part I

Chapter 46.1: 1995, Georgina

Chapter 46.1: 1995, Georgina

There was no sleep last night. Instead, I dreamed awake of a Saturday night much like this one from many years ago. Falling sleet, a night of no sleep. However, the difference was so far apart. For instead of alone, there was a boy speaking to me in Italian in my bed. A boy with swept up blonde bangs, clean from the shower and shining wheat color. My hand was in this hair, gentle as his slow, sleepy voice. 

He spoke of many things. Wandering things, for he was so tired. Among those things was a conversation I will never let go of. Oh, his dear heart, his bare soul. I had no idea of the pain. A pain that rivaled my own, surely. And yet he went through it soberly, taking it quietly and with a small smile. A shy, little smile always.

I understood him so much better after that conversation. He was forever changed to me, and if he'd opened his sleepy eyes he'd have seen my pain seeping out, joining his. But as his voice leaked into the air, it was all I could do but cry and listen, holding him tighter and tighter, which I'm not sure he felt because he was just so, so sleepy. 

In Italian words, light and airy, he told me a sorrowful story of remorse and love. 

He told me of his mother, this kind, beautiful Italian woman. A woman who adored to sing and adored him, a musical little boy like her. His brothers were his father's sons, but this little boy was all her's. 

The little boy was her world and she was his world, too. He had no other friends because other children did not like him, not even his brothers, and he couldn't figure out why. Though, he said, they liked to call him this "sissy" word, but this word did not hurt him because his mother loved him. She always was telling him how there was nothing wrong with him, he was a perfect boy, her little man. She was so proud of him.

On Sundays, they'd put on aprons and she'd turn on the radio to her favorite pop music. Girl groups like the Chordettes and the McGuire Sisters. Connie Francis, Doris Day. Dancing together, singing with their mixing spoons, they'd twirl and make raw cookie dough. Or cake batter. Or brownies. They'd bake all Sunday together, making sweet treats for after school the next week. This was the part of the week the boy looked forward to the most. It was a time where they were all alone in the house and nobody could tell them to stop it. Nobody was there to say no, as his father often did to them in turn for various things.

When the boy grew older, his mother took on students because she knew how to play the piano really well. Oh, how the boy was fascinated. Such beautiful music came out of her fingers. He hadn't known she could do this, too, as well as sing like a sweet song bird. Of course, how could such a caring mother overlook her son's interest? His looks when she taught the students, how he'd sit in the living room near them doing schoolwork but the page in his book never turning.

So these sweet treat Sundays turned into piano Sundays, and the boy was so happy. His mother was so happy, too, because she could further spread her love of music to him this way. Such a smile you've never seen, he said, when she taught him. That smile was for the angels.

But she was for the angels, it turned out, because she got the cancer. The boy never knew what of, but it was bad. The boy was sixteen now, and his mother was still smiling but in a pain. She couldn't teach the piano anymore, but she really liked it when he sat at the piano when she was on the couch under her loosely weaved white blanket. He'd play Chopin and she'd smile and he'd feel relief, but no hope.

One day, they were in the living room. The boy thought she was asleep, so he was at his father's desk studying for Social Studies. He remembered that day very well. He paused then, and I squeezed him. In a hitched breath, he told me why he remembered that day so vividly.

"She started speaking in a raspy voice," he told me. "She said such terrible things."

With a deep sigh of sorrow, he went on. The boy had been at the chestnut wood desk, his hand pressed to his hair. And when she unexpectedly spoke, he looked up, his pen falling into his book from where it had been balanced on its very tip between his lips. 

Because she said, "Frankie. My dear. Reach under the desk. Give it to me. I can't take it anymore."

He gave a sound here to me that I could not understand, a choke of a laugh or maybe the beginning of a sob or both. Something stifled and strange, foreign. But his eyes were still closed. He went on as if this had never happened

So, the boy got up from the desk, not obeying her for the first time in his life. He'd seen her white blanket had fallen off her to the floor halfway. The blanket that never seemed to look warm enough to him. The bobbed dark brown hair of the wig she now wore was a mess around her face. Her too skinny face, because she hadn't been eating for too long. The once healthy, youthful look gone. Seeing her like that, her light green eyes which once reminded him of the rare yellow sweet grass of spring now wild and sickeningly despairing, he felt despair himself for the first time in his life.

Gently, he lifted the white blanket off of the floor and draped it so carefully over her again. She didn't protest, just stared at him with those eyes. With all of his love, he smoothed her hair away from her face, tucking it behind her ear as best he could. She was silent and he was silent, but those words were still floating in the room. 

He went to the desk and sat down again, watching her slight form on the couch, thinking of her words.

"Reach under the desk. Give it to me."

With a long breath, he reached under the desk, but he knew what was there already. What he'd find. And as his slender piano hand folded over the small, unforgiving form under the desk, his breath turned shaky and painful. Too painful to bear.

Because he knew she'd asked for his father's gun.

"I can't take it anymore."

And he wondered if he'd done the right thing going over to her empty-handed, such was his love. For he knew she was in such agony to have asked him, whom she loved so much, to give this to her just now like that. How vulnerable and shameful her eyes had been. So ashamed, but so in agony despair they'd told him silently that she didn't care anymore. She'd just wanted to leave.

She left three months later. In her sleep, at the hospital. Nobody cried, because he had to be a man and a man can't cry even when his mother dies. But he cried inside, and he was so angry at his father and brothers for not crying at her funeral. He wanted to hit them, wanted to hit everything, himself. Because she was gone and what was he going to do now? What was he supposed to do now?

He felt so selfish for feeling so alone, but she had been his best friend. His only friend, his only mom.

Soon after this last confession, he stopped speaking to me in the bed. His breaths were of sleep, so I laid in the dark against his warm, strong, brave body. My Frankie. But he wasn't finished.

With another long breath, he sighed to me something that changed my life. 

"You remind me of her sometimes," he breathed, "when you play the piano. When you sing. When I saw you on stage that first night, I knew she'd have loved you right away. You're musical like her, like me. You're like us, not like my father's crowd, always having to be somebody else to impress everybody. That's why I want you to be who you are, because I love you. I know she'd love you, too." He sighed deeply and spoke no more, just finally fallen asleep in a mercy.

My sweet boy. Her sweet boy. I couldn't have spoken if I wanted to at that moment. I held onto him, protecting him so hard. Fiercely loving him, needing to. He deserved to be loved, and he would be forever. I vowed I'd always be there for him like she had been, that I'd never leave him as a promise to her, a silent prayer in the darkness.

But he left me. 

The only consolation I ever have these days is that he's somewhere up there with his mom. Being loved.