INTERMISSION

INTERMISSION

Frank Donatelli had seen the opera enough times to know that when
Baron Scarpa swears to Tosca,
"For you I will forsake salvation!" the curtain would be falling on
the first act. It was time to applaud and
call out "Bravo! Bravo!" Intermission.

"Honey," he said, standing now, "I'll be right back. Got to get on the
men's room line."

Lynn Donatelli pulled herself back in her seat to give her husband
room to get by.
"Don't be long," she said. "Curtain's going up before you know
it."

"Save my seat, Honey," he said, gently pinching her cheek. "Want to
come with me?
A drink maybe?"

"No, just hurry!"

When he got there, so it seemed had every other guy. Politely as he
could, he shouldered
his way through the crowd in search of the men's room on the second
floor, where hopefully the line
would be shorter. His father came to mind just then. "When you need to
use the john and there's a long line,
just move to the front," his father once said. "Tell them you're from
the board of health. You gotta get in there to
see if the men's room needs to be closed temporarily or for the whole
day. Try it, Kid. It works every time."

He tried hard not to think of his old man. Whenever he did, thoughts
came in a flash, uncalled for,
imposing. He let them play themselves out. As long as they remained
one-dimensional inside his head he could
handle them. Reminiscing about his father in three-dimension was too
depressing. Had it been a year already?
So many months on and off that respirator. All those doctors sharing
the opinion that there was not the slightest
shred of hope. "Your father's dying of emphysema," said Dr. Yu. "Also
lung cancer," chimed in Dr. Nichols. "A few
weeks I give him," Dr. Jamal said. "Maybe less," said Dr. Yu.

Towards the end his old man no longer cared how many weeks. "The
quicker the better!" he scribbled in the
notebook they'd given him since he could not speak with the respirator
forced down his throat. But months before when
X-rays diagnosed his persistent cough as very bad news, his father had
said, "It's my own fault. Smoking, you know.
Sure I quit four years ago. Too late though. I tried quitting years
ago when I was about thirty. It didn't work. I was at the
Brooklyn Navy Yard back then. In a welding crew. Just before the
Second Big One. 1940, I guess. A year before you
were born, Frankie. Bunch of us on lunch break outside the plant. They
were passing time smoking.
'Mike, you're not smoking?' one of the guys says.

'For a month now I quit,' I tell him. Well, he laughs. Says he never
noticed.

'Here, Mike, have a Lucky.' My old brand.

'Thanks but no thanks,' I tell this guy. 'Wanna quit while I'm ahead,
know what I mean, Chuck?' but this guy is mad.
You could see his eyes burning up because I was saying no.

'Hey, Mike. Show me a man who doesn't smoke and I'll show you--' but
he left it at that. The rest of the guys standing
around mentally filled in the words. They were all looking at me.
Waiting. Such a small thing. One lousy cigarette. What could it
do to me, right? So I took the Lucky. Figured I'd smoke it and that
would be the end of it. Was I supposed to have those guys I
worked with think Mike Donatelli was no man? It burned the hell out of
my throat and it felt like fire inside my chest. But here's the
sad part: later, on the way home, I bought a pack and it was like I
never quit. I was smoking again. What do you think of that?"

Less than a year later he would be looking at us with those sad eyes
that begged for a swift death. It was better not to
think about it, Frank reminded himself. In the whole world there was
no one he had loved more than his old man. To die like that.
It was unfair.

The rest-room line now was behind him. Thank God! Soon the opera house
lights would dim, then flash. TOSCA would
begin its second act. He had to get a move on. No way could he return
to his set and squirm till the end of the opera. He'd come
this far. Better late than the discomfort of--

Pushing at the men's room door, Frank Donatelli walked into a huge
factory yard. Workers everywhere. Some were
sitting on the ground. Others propped themselves against the stone
building walls. It was lunchtime. What the hell is this? Frank
said
out loud, then moved back towards what he expected to find--the
bathroom door but it was gone. In its place smoke billowed from a
chugging generator.

What the hell is this? he asked again, this time to himself. Where is
Tosca? My wife? The discomfort of a full bladder had
vanished, replaced by a numbness all over, a disconnectedness he could
not get a handle on. What door takes me back?

On the other side of the bathroom door--the safe side--it was a
bitterly cold January. Here laborers with rolled up sleeves were
sweating under a hot sun. Out of place in his dark blue business suit,
he loosened his burgundy tie.

"What do you want?" someone startled him. "High security here, Mister.
You got papers? Badge? A pass? What gives?"

Frank stood there, shaking his head. To everything the answer was
No.

"There's a war on in Europe, Mister. Soon enough we'll be in it. You
one of them Germans?"

Frank was not at liberty to simply throw up. Instead, he swallowed the
bile in his throat. I'm not only lost; I'm lost in some
long-ago past: my father's! "The Brooklyn Navy Yard. 1940, I guess. It
was a year before you were born, Frankie."

"You looking for who?" asked the man with the badge that showed his
face, his number, and the words "High Security."
"Mike Donatelli, welder. He's my kid brother. I need to talk to
him."

The hardness of the badged man's face softened into a facsimile of a
smile. "You talk to Mike, then you get the hell out,
right, Mister?"

"Yeah, sure," Frank agreed, not knowing what kind of trick would make
that possible.

"Welding crews you find on that wall," said the man, pointing to a
building across the field. "Your brother, as you know,
is crew boss. "Building A or B. You'll find him with most of his
men."

The idea of looking at his father's face again, to see him alive and
well, was enough to drop him fainting in his tracks.
But Frank made himself strong, kept the idea in its flat one
dimension, continued walking towards the Buildings. He could feel
his
trembling legs like a clown's stilts, heavy and clumsy.

"Go ahead, Mike, take one," he heard one of the welding crew say near
the building marked with the huge A. Then his
father's reply, "I quit a month ago. Thanks but no thanks, Chuck."
Frank could hear them all laughing.

His father waved the cigarettes away, tried hard to turn this
challenge into something friendly, even humorous, rolling his
eyes upward, exaggerating a smile on his face. But Chuck wasn't buying
it. "No butts about it," said his father. "I'm quitting while
I'm ahead."

"Hey, Mike, you show me a guy who doesn't smoke--"

"Don't take the cigarette, Mike!"

The crew, including his father, turned to face the man in the neat
dark-blue suit. Who the hell was he? they wondered.

"Where's your badge, Buddy? You got permission be walking around
here?"

Frank ingnored Chuck, ingnored all of them, except his father. "I quit
smoking myself, Mike. It's not easy, but it's not impossible
either. Just got to stick to it. You take this cigarette now and you'll
be smoking forever, understand?"

"Who are you?" asked Michael Donatelli.

"That's not important. What I'm telling you is. Don't do it. I knew a
guy like you who quit once, went back, and ended up
eventually dying from it. You want that?"

One of the workers thought that funny enough to give it a good laugh.
"Get lost, Mister. Ain't nobody dies from smoking!"

"Yeah," called out another, "that's what men do!"

Mike turned to the others, waved a hand back at Frank. "This guy in
the suit is right. Hey, he's talking sense. No, you keep
the Lucky, okay, Chuck? You smoke it. It ain't worth it to me."

Turning back, he smiled at Frank, thanked him with a nod, and began to
walk away towards Building B. Giving up on their crew boss,
the guys lit up or continued puffing on their cigarettes.

Frank watched him walk away. It was his three-dimensional father and
it didn't matter that he had walked through a men's
room door into some kind of twilight zone. It didn't matter that here
was 1940 a good fifty-five years late and that here in this time and
place
he was old enough to be his father's father. He had to reach him,
embrace him, touch the father whom death had stolen from him. He
needed
to say what he had wanted to say so many times but wasn't sure men
said that to other men, even to their fathers. He had easily said it
countless
times to Lynn, to the children, even a couple of times to his old
mother, but never to this man who had come back to him because of some
time quirk
that was beyond his comprehension. "I love you" hollered in his head
now. He raced toward his father who walked, hurriedly it seemed,
across
the field towards the other stone building. "I love you, Pa!" but it
was just a thought locked in his head, buzzing behind his closed lips.
When finally
he let it escape him, he saw his father turn, not to his voice, but to
the warning voices up on the roof of Building B, screaming at him to
watch out.
"Watch out! Watch out!"

The huge wooden crate hanging perilously from the snapped cable gave
way and appeared to be falling down through space in slow
motion, or at least that was how Frank was seeing it now: a freeze
frame of time in which he witnessed his own father beneath the falling
crate that
soon would crush him. It was too late. Neither he nor his father could
do anything now.

Freed from the sentence that one teasing cigarette would have
ultimately imposed, his father had walked away, had stood beneath the
place
of his immediate undoing. His crew were safe, smoking their cigarettes
before returning to work at Building B.

Crowds immediately swarmed around his father, sprawled and broken
beneath the huge crate. Like a human fence they stood in Frank's
way;
he tried to push through. He felt his bladder close to bursting. At
last he reached the factory door of Building B through which they had
carried his father.
The crowd dispersed when someone with authority barked orders to get
back to work "Now!" The crowd gone, Frank pushed against the factory
door.
Behind him the afternoon sun went out like some giant candle, then
flashed back on, then once more burned out. There isn't much time, he
thought. My
father! Save my father! But this time the sun did not come out again.
"1940, I guess," he remembered his father saying so many years ago. "A
year
before you were born, Frankie."

###

An old woman, clutching a dark mink around her stooped shoulders,
asked the woman seated, "Is anyone sitting here?"

"No," said Lynn Farrington, smiling. "The seat's empty. Sit. Act two
is about to begin."

(C) 1998 Salvatore Amico M. Buttaci