Page 2 of A Winter in New York

“Belotti’s gelateria,” Bobby says, not looking up from hisphone. “I’m surprised they’re closed during the festival actually, there’s always a line.”

I shoot him a testy look. “Is it as good as mine?”

“How could it be?” Bobby’s sigh is pure theater. “If I meant anything to you, you’d let me put that stuff on the menu in the restaurant.”

“Never going to happen,” I laugh, my eyes still lingering on that unusual door. Bobby is the person I like most in the world these days, but we’re still not serving my mother’s gelato in the Very Tasty Noodle House. Not in Katz’s Deli either, for that matter. Nor in the super-swish dining room at the Plaza, not even if the head chef got down on his knees and begged me. My mum was a bohemian free spirit with an ever-playful glint in her eye, but she had one stone-cold serious rule when it came to her vanilla gelato recipe: it was a secret that I could never share with another living soul. It is the best vanilla on the planet and remains my desert island food. She made it for me as a small child and as a grown woman, served from her favorite vintage cotton-candy pink melamine bowls. And then when she became ill I made it for her, until it was the only food her body could stomach. Until it became more about the memories than the taste. She’d close her eyes as I held the spoon to her dry lips, the smallest amount enough to raise the ghost of a smile.

I click the camera open on my phone and snap a shot of the distinctive door, even though I almost don’t need to because it’s so memorable. Its slender old mahogany frame houses a bevel-edged sheet of plate glass, which has been hand-painted with a green-striped cup of swirled gelato topped with cherries and a neon spoon at a jaunty angle. The jewel colors pop from the glass as if freshly painted justyesterday, even though it exudes unmistakably stylish old-time ambience.

“I think I’m done,” I say, taking one long, last glance at the door. “If I eat anything else I’ll collapse.”

“Home, then?” Bobby offers me his arm, and we step out into the crowds and duck our heads against the rain.

2.

It comes back to mein an adrenaline-fueled rush as we make our way home, the door jumping out from my memories of a photograph I’ve looked at hundreds of times over the course of my life. As soon as we let ourselves through the peeling red side door beside the noodle house I make a garbled excuse to Bobby about grabbing a quick nap before evening service starts. I’m more wired than tired, though, as I slam the door of my apartment, my mind racing as I head straight for my bedroom, shrugging my coat off as I go. I drag my mother’s scrapbook down from the top of the wardrobe and drop back onto the bed with it in my arms. I’ve looked at this stuffed-to-the-brim book countless times over the years, both with and without my mother by my side to fill in the blanks. It’s a potted history of her youthful hopes and dreams, proof that she followed her performer’s heart, even if things didn’t work out quite the way she’d hoped in the end. Official publicity shots of her eighties band sit alongside more candid photos that pulse with gig-energy, cuttings from trade magazines, reviews from papers, the occasional ticket stub, the front of a cigarette box signed by all of the members of the band. I can’t read their illegible scrawl and I don’t recall their names, except for the confident red signature at the bottombelonging to Charlie Raven, the band’s drummer. My father. He was my mother’s on–off lover for several years, a physical relationship she always knew was destined to go nowhere. It ended the day she declined his offer to give her enough money to terminate her pregnancy. I have no memory of him at all; he died in a helicopter accident when I was six. My mother said she wasn’t all that surprised when news reached her of his death, because he was the kind of full-throttle person who rarely lives to see old age. She didn’t speak badly of him, exactly, just painted a picture of someone wild who blazed bright and burned out. She probably felt it was reassuring for me to hear I shared little in common with him except my surname, which she chose for me over her own anonymous Smith. My father’s death has always just been a footnote in my story, someone who bears very little impact on who I am today. Charlie Raven, forever thirty-two.

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 seeingthe 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, channelingBreakfast Clubcool 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 notso 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. TheBelottis 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 calmerthis 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.

What would she make of my doing this, going to this gelateria that she seems to have intentionally kept me unaware of? Why would one of the family members give her their recipe? I’ve no intention of revealing her secret, of course, but I yearn to understand how the pieces of her life then intersect with my life now, to press a conch shell to my ear and catch the echo of her across time.

Belotti’s looks much the same as it did last night: no queue, no sign of being open. I step inside the sheltered doorway and study the freehand glass painting up close, noticing how fresh the colors are, how carefully cared for it is for an aged piece of art. I know from looking at the gelateria’s website that they’ve embraced the design as a central part of their unique business fingerprint, recreating it on their aprons, menus, and cups. I’m lost in thought as I examine it, so much so that I don’t notice the movement inside until the door opens, making me jump.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” the guy says as I step sharply back, startled.

I summon a smile. “It was my own fault, standing too close to the door. I was just looking at the artwork.”

He glances at it too, and then at me. For a moment I get the same déjà-vu feeling as when I saw the door, as if I know him already. Which is crazy, of course, because I don’t, and he doesn’t look especially like the guy in my mother’s photo, so that can’t be it either.

“Are you open yet?” I glance past him into the empty shop.

“Not exactly,” he says. “I’m just firing up the coffee machine, but there’s no gelato.”

I could leave now—the gelato is why I came, after all, butcoffee and a chance to step inside is better than leaving altogether if I want to know what this place was to my mother.

“Coffee sounds good,” I say, and he lifts his shoulders and moves aside to let me pass.

“You’re early for the festival,” he says, heading behind the counter.

“Oh, I know. I was just here yesterday, actually.”

He gestures for me to take one of the oxblood leather bar seats at the counter as he turns his back to kickstart the coffee machine into life. I watch him fill the bean hopper, observing the easy confidence of his moves as he sets two cups on the counter and adds milk to the foamer. I’m a coffee junkie, just the sounds and smells are enough to relax my shoulders from around my ears. I unwind my scarf and place it on the swivel chair beside mine, taking in the old-school mahogany and brass atmosphere of the place and the welcome glow of the multicolored Tiffany-style glass lampshades. There’s a small upright piano in the far corner and family photographs fill the walls, generations of Belotti men and women standing behind this same counter. The place has barely changed over the years, which is, of course, all part of its charm. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and all that.

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