Every page of my mother’s album is full to overlapping, a tightly packed chronicle of the band’s brush with the big time. But that isn’t what I’m looking for right now. I flip quickly to the very last page. Just two precious things are pinned in place: a photograph and a torn, scrawled-on napkin. I peel back the protective layer and lift the photo carefully away, feeling the tug of age try to grip it in place. I stare at it now with fresh eyes, even though there’s no question in my mind. Same mahogany frame, same brass handle, same striking paintwork. It’s the same door. I’ve never known where the photograph I’ve looked at so many times was taken, with its faded summer look of a holiday romance, and my mother always declined to elaborate.
Turning the photograph over, I read her familiar script: Santo, 1985, a love heart doodled beside his name. Just seeing the loops and dips of her handwriting, so similar to my own, is enough to bring a lump to my throat. I flip it back to study the photo again. The young man gazes back at me. He’s laughing, thick dark hair flopping over the hand he’s raised to shield his eyes from the sun. The distinctive shop door is ajar behind him, sunlight refracting the colors in an arc across the image. Everything about the photograph is retro-stylish, from the hand-painted door to the guy himself, channeling Breakfast Club cool with his eighties leather bomber jacket, white T, and bleached jeans. I wrack my brain, trying to pin down any scraps of information I can pull out. There isn’t much. She was a storyteller, my mother, but she always steered the conversation away when it came to this photo and the napkin alongside it, only ever going so far as to say that the guy was quite possibly the love of her young life. The mint-green napkin is torn in half, leaving just the second part of a gold printed logo visible: otti’s. My mind connects the dots. Belotti’s? I’ve never known before what the whole logo said, but I know by heart what’s written on it in confident blue ink. Our beloved gelato recipe.
A quick internet search lands me on Belotti’s homepage, a photograph of the shop basking in summer sunshine beneath a green-and-white-striped awning. Seeing that painted glass door on my screen is oddly familiar, like finding an old photo from your childhood of a place you’ve long forgotten. I don’t know if my mother ever actually took me there as a child. I don’t think so. I was born a couple of summers after she started touring, and we left America for good when I was three years old, far too young to recollect such specifics. How strange, really, that I should find myself living near to a place so important to her without realizing. But then, perhaps not so strange—moving to New York City felt like an obvious choice because my mother spoke so fondly of it, and recollections of her band memories and her early glory days nudged me toward the Lower East Side. My eyes linger for a moment on my wardrobe, my thoughts on the silver urn tucked away carefully at the back. There is a small comfort to be drawn from knowing she’s here with me, that I’ve brought her to the place she first felt at home. Maybe one day I’ll find the right time and place to let her go, to lay her to rest in the city she loved.
I look back at the photo again, my heart heavy and my head full of questions. I’ve always known that the guy in the photo was Italian, as of course is the recipe, but I just imagined the photo and the recipe came from a trip to Italy rather than from my mother’s time in New York. Did my mother ever tell me that? I can’t recall that she did, but then I’m not certain she didn’t either. Maybe I’ve just lazily assumed it and over the years she allowed it to go uncorrected. And now here I am, a breath away from the place, reading the Belotti family website, unsure how on earth I have their recipe. They have a long, proud history in Little Italy stretching back to 1911, black-and-white photos of the gelateria spanning the decades, aproned family shots taken behind the glass-topped counter I glimpsed through the window earlier. I scan the website, digesting their story, struck by one recurring fact in particular: their famous and beloved vanilla recipe—the only flavor they actually serve, interestingly enough—is a closely guarded secret. So closely guarded, in fact, that only two members of the Belotti family are ever allowed to know it at any one time. My eyes track to the open scrapbook on the bed, to the recipe written hastily across that torn napkin. The Belottis have fiercely protected this recipe for more than a hundred years, so why was it revealed to my mother? I understand now why she was always so insistent that I never share it with anyone—because it was never ours to share. Assuming it’s the same, of course, which I guess is the next thing I should find out.
If I want to begin to unravel how my mother’s life story overlaps with the Belottis, the first thing I have to do is taste their gelato for myself.
3.
MULBERRY STREET IS DECIDEDLY CALMER this morning than it was last night with the festival in full swing, now buzzing with a quiet sense of industry and anticipation for the new day of feasting ahead. Chairs are being set out beneath sidewalk café awnings as catering wagons crank up their ovens; there’s a similar feel in the air to when you take your seat at a theater, the orchestra tuning up in the pits, that base-level excitement as you wait for curtain-up. It isn’t raining today, but the chill in the air is enough for me to have layered a thick woolen scarf over my denim jacket. One of Bobby’s, I think; he treats my apartment as an overflow closet for his expansive clothing collection. Or his tester stock, as he calls it, given that he owns three clothing boutiques across the city and is on the brink of opening his fourth. The guy might not know much about noodles, but he’s a savvy businessman and quicksilver when it comes to his professional life. He somehow seems to have more hours in his day than everyone else—a businessman, a social dynamo, and a loved-up husband, yet still he finds unhurried time for me, especially if my gelato machine has been on.
Pulling my phone out, I check the time. A little after nine. I can see Belotti’s coming up on the right and drag my feet, unexpectedly nervous now I’m near. It’s not as though anyone is going to recognize me. I bear a startling resemblance to my mother, but it’s been more than thirty years since she would have been here. I pause and step to the side, imagining her making her way along this exact same sidewalk in the mid-eighties. What would she have had on her feet, I wonder, gazing down at my own apple-green Converse? Nothing, probably, if she could have gotten away with it. She’d have been much younger than I am now, eighteen or nineteen at most, shiny-eyed and full of ambition. My chest constricts as I think of her, even more so when I think about the fact that she isn’t here anymore.
For a while after she died, I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a world without her in it. I still can’t, not fully. My mother was always brimming full of bright, wonderful life, a human rainbow. Watching cancer systematically strip her of her colors was profoundly difficult, a dimmer switch turning in the wrong direction no matter what the doctors did to try to slow it down. I’ve never felt more hopeless than in those final days sitting at her bedside, desperate to keep her with me for one more conversation, one more reassuring clasp of my hand, one more smile. She insisted on staying in her flat, surrounded by her belongings and the memories that accompanied them, rather than going into hospital. At the exact moment she died, the large woven dreamcatcher hanging above her old cast-iron bedstead began to slowly twirl. Some might have said it caught on a wind from the cracked-open window, but I am my mother’s daughter and I prefer to think that she blew on it just for me, to let me know she was safely on her way, and that it was time for me to be on mine too.