Mr. And Mrs. Vic Damone Proudly Present

Vic sits on the Venetian couch in the den, watching TV. Nourished and dry, Perry Rocco Luigi lies beside him, giving out now and then with an accomplished gurgle. Pier trips down from above, rounding the corner of the staircase. Vic looks up at her. It’s no casual glance. When people stare—even her husband—Pier goes shy. What’s the matter?” she asks, to cover her confusion.

“Nothing. I just can’t believe that you’re up and around. And laughing. I want to fill my eyes with it.” This little scene recurs again and again. Or some variation of it. There was the day he brought her home from the hospital. Again she had to go to bed. “But for only two weeks,” she exulted. “Imagine, Vic!” Memories came crowding of the weary months of her pregnancy, of the patient little figure lying endlessly quiet. Filled with almost unbearable tenderness, he smoothed the hair from her forehead, making a wishful promise, exacting a pledge. “From now on no more sickness for you, my darling, and no more tears. Only big smiles all the time.” “If I smile all the time, people will think I am stupid.” Then the laughter broke. “Let them think, who cares?”

Both have good reason to know that life’s not one huge joke. Their joy is measured by the sorrow that lies behind them. Today is brighter because of yesterday’s darkness. Yet the long period of tension, of hope alternating with terror, remains unforgotten, woven into the fibre of experience. “What you live,” says Pier, “it becomes a part of you, to make you stronger or weaker. But to push it away as if it never happened is to be a child. We are not children, Vic and I.”

Each month they celebrate the 24th, anniversary of their wedding day. On September 24, Vic presented her with a brace of hamburgers. Pier calls them “omburgers” and loves them by any name with all the trimmings. Nestled between them she found a small white box. Inside lay a beveled gold wedding-band, exactly like Vic’s except for its greater width. “I thought maybe you’d like to use it,” he said, “instead of the other when you wear gold jewelry,”

“Never!” she cried with a vehemence that startled him. “Oh Vic, it’s beautiful. But never since you put it, did I take my real wedding ring off, and I never will.”

So the gold circlet gleams on her right hand and bears its own significance. “When we got married, we were happy, we loved each other. But not like now. We didn’t know then that such happiness as now could be. Maybe that awful accident and everything that happened brought us more together. Maybe it was God’s plan, how do I know? For me, I know only that Vic and the baby is everything. And for Vic?” Like a brook touched by sunlight, the mobile face changed swiftly from grave to gay. “Vic is still up on stars.”

The shadow of dread

It was a rocky road that led to the stars. You know all about the plane accident, the shock and injury to Pier, the weeks of pain and fear for the baby’s life. Slow recovery followed and a measure of reassurance, always shadowed by dread. The child was alive, yes, but no one could promise that he hadn’t been hurt somehow through his mother’s hurt. As she was to say later: “Till the baby was born, never did I know if the baby would be all right.” Neither she nor Vic dwelt on these apprehensions. But to banish them was impossible. The shadow had fallen and they learned to live with it.

As time passed, their spirits lightened. Everyone was feeling easier about Pier when the second blow struck. One night she went to bed, all agog over the shower planned by her studio friends next day. But she didn’t make it. Seized by premature labor pains, she was rushed to the hospital instead, where Vic paced the corridor and white-clad figures moved silently about her room, doing what they had to do. Between spasms of pain, her eyes opened, searching for faces about her for some sign. “How old is the baby?” asked a nurse, sounding casual.

“Six and a half months.”

The nurse was young, not yet trained to clinical impassivity. Pier caught her expression before she turned away. “They’re afraid,” she thought dully—and felt another familiar hand at her wrist. Dr. Krohn stood beside her, bringing a sense of solidity to the dreamlike atmosphere where people walked around and would tell you nothing. He was her trusted friend as well as physician. She kept her voice steady. “Please, doctor, nobody has to lie to me. I need the truth.”

Having long since tested her mettle, he answered as honestly as she’d asked. “If the baby comes now, he will not live.”

The words rang in her brain and it seemed strange to Pier, numbed by too much emotion, that she should lie there tearless, looking back at the girl who’d wept so many tears. “Maybe,” she reflected wearily, “I have cried enough. If that’s what God wants. . . .”

But this was a thought she wouldn’t let herself finish. On the white pillow, the dark head turned and turned. “Doctor, how does it look?”

“We must wait till morning. I’m going to give you something to help you relax. Go to sleep and I’ll be near you.”

“But I want Vic.”

“I’m sorry, he can’t come in.”

“For two minutes?”

“Not for one.”

“Then tell him I love him.”

She slept till noon and woke to blessed freedom from pain. Again Dr. Krohn stood beside her. “We have a chance,” he said.

The chance depended on absolute rest for three days, all visitors barred, including her husband. This time she made no demur. “For Vie and the baby and me, I want to be quiet.” For Vic, the hours crawled. For Pier, under sedation most of the time, they passed hazily. Till the fourth morning. Till the doctor came in, even before he said it, she could read in his smile that the baby was safe. “Now you can see Vic,” he added.

Hearing such beautiful news, her eyes danced. “Doctor, wait. Can I go to the end of the bed?”

“How do you mean?”

“Always my husband sees me lying down. I want to surprise him. If it will hurt the baby, no. But if not?”

So when Vic entered, bearing flowers, he came face to face with his wife, kneeling at the foot of the bed to greet him. “How do you like us?” she crowed into his neck. “We are showing off for you, our baby and me.”

“Good enough for Rome”

Through the final months she did little showing off, confined to bed for the most part, glad to slip back after an hour up in the late afternoon. Since the house they’d bought wasn’t ready, they lived in a big room at her mother’s with their own TV and private telephone number. In bed, Pier pored over colors and fabrics for their home—to divert her mind and because they were eager to move in as quickly as possible. Vic left the designing to her. After all, she’d studied interior decorating, helped her father decorate one of the loveliest apartments in Rome. “What’s good enough for Rome,” said Vic, “is good enough for me. Just remember I don’t like red and I want to do my study by myself.”

At night she’d spread her samples before him, unwilling to settle anything without his okay. Evening after evening, dependent only on each other, they knew their moments of fun and their moments of crisis. “Vic,” she’d cry in panic, “the baby’s not moving.”

“He will move, let’s wait.”

Then, as she tells it, “We would both stay with the hands, with the eyes wide open—soon he was kicking. How we would laugh—like a feast.”

Or the fear haunting them both would suddenly find expression, if only oblique. “Oh, Vic, I hope I give you a beautiful baby.”

“How can you miss?” he’d counter, keeping it light. Sometimes humor failed. Sometimes she’d cling to him wordlessly, seeking strength from his, and he’d hold her close. “Just say, ‘God help me,’ Anna. Come, we’ll say it together.” Together they’d make the sign of the cross and pray.

If, before bedtime, she felt the smallest twinge, he’d go to bed with his suit on. If she so much as moaned, he’d call Charlotte, whatever the hour. Charlotte was Dr. Krohn’s nurse and their rock of Gibraltar, always ready with wise answers to foolish questions. “She said ‘oh!’ ” Vic would report. “What shall I do?”

“Ask her if the pain comes every fifteen minutes.”

“What pain?” murmured Pier.

“Ask her if her stomach contracts?” Charlotte asked.

“I’m sleeping,” said Pier. “And, please, Vic, at four o’clock in the morning, Jet this poor girl sleep, too.”

“You think babies can’t come at four in the morning?”

No answer. Over to the bed he’d steal and back to the phone. “Charlotte?” he’d whisper. “She’s asleep. What shall I do?”

“If she wakes up, call me.”

They moved on August 18. “I want to be in our house,” pleaded Pier. Apart from kitchen equipment, it held a bed and a couch. “I don’t care, even with a mattress on the floor. When you sing to me there, Vic, everything will sparkle. You’ll sing and I’ll sing and I will be always off key but I’ll sing anyway.”

He carried her to the car and drove like a snail up Bel-Air’s winding hills to the two-story Colonial. Inez, the maid, welcomed them as Vic bore his wife over the threshold. He let her feast for a few minutes on the blue-gray walls with their delicate trailing murals spaced here and there, on the gray rugs and the curtains of softest rose. He let her squeal over the couch. To Pier, Venice is the loveliest and most romantic city in the world. Yearning for a touch of Venice in America, she’d chosen for the couch a fabric patterned in Venetian scenes. On the living-room mantel he set the exquisite Venetian-glass Punchinello that Pier had dragged all over Europe with her by hand. Then he put her to bed.

Two days later she felt frisky enough to come down to dinner. They’d asked Charlotte to join them. Before dinner they sat out on the patio, reveling in their view. When it came time to get up, Pier needed help. “Leg cramps,” she explained.

“I think,” said Charlotte, “maybe Dr. Krohn better see you.”

“Pooh! I have them now for three weeks.”

“Well, just to be on the safe side, eat light.”

“Eat light? I am hungry. We have spaghetti, beautiful, with tuna fish.”

“Eat light,” repeated the voice of authority, and Pier obeyed. Just the same, she couldn’t manage to rise to her feet. Charlotte made for the phone. A few minutes later the doctor was saying to Pier: “It’s a beautiful night. Why don’t you drive down to the hospital and I’ll check you.

Up the stairs tore Vic, and back with her coat and suitcase. His wife was in high spirits that evening. The suitcase reduced her to helpless merriment. “Vic, I am coming home with you. I have no pain. I am not going to sleep in the hospital.”

She was right about one thing, she didn’t do much sleeping.

“I want to have pains”

For twelve hours they tried to induce labor. In the darkened room, Pier couldn’t tell whether it was day or night. At length Charlotte came in. “Dr. Krohn thinks we may have to do a Caesarean.”

The great eyes clouded. “No,” she begged. “I want to have pains like everybody.”

But nature refused to co-operate. The doctor made his decision, and still Pier fought against it. “Dear doctor, please, only a little longer . . .”

“We’ve waited long enough. I’m doing what I think best for you and the baby.” She’ll never forget the look in his kind, tired face, nor the quiet entreaty in his voice. “Please, Pier, don’t make me change my mind.”

All resistance crumbled. In the delivery room swift preparations went forward. “Now you have a choice,” said the doctor. “Would you like to go to sleep or stay awake and see your baby?”

A small smile tilted her mouth and she “made a small speech. “For nine months I have waited, remember, doctor? The accident, the kicking, the premature labor pains, the whole thing. I want to be awake, doctor, what do you think! I want finally to see this baby of mine.”

The rest sounds better in her own words than anyone else’s:

“For the baby I am anxious. For myself I am not frightened, only full of questions. But I cannot talk because they put me something in the mouth. I can see only the heads moving around. I can hear the doctor ask, ‘Give me this, give me that.’ Then I hear silence, so I know something begins. Then: ‘It’s a boy. And what a boy! He looks just like Vic.’ I smile to myself because he looks like Vic and because for nine months they told me I’ll have a girl. Then they show me that boy. When I see him, I know right away nothing is wrong, and from all my heart I thank God.

“When they take me out at four, I am pretty tired. I remember Vic bending over me. ‘How are his eyes?’ I ask. Always, I cannot tell why, but always I worry most about the eyes. ‘Beautiful,’ said Vic. ‘His eyes are beautiful and so is everything else and I’m so proud of you.’

“This is all I remember. Until I woke up and my husband was standing there and our baby was born and the whole world played sweet music.”

Perry Rocco Luigi Damone

Perry Rocco Luigi, a buster, weighed in at eight pounds, thirteen ounces. The middle names are for Vic’s father and Pier’s, first for Perry Como. From the beginning, Vic had his heart set on calling a after Como. “Will you let me?” he asked.

“Of course,” she agreed, moved by his feeling, finding in Vic’s admiration for his friend a tribute to both men.

At the time of her accident, the Comos were on vacation in Palm Springs. “They came three times to the hospital to see me, they brought me books, they were so very and. But Vic knows Perry more deeply I do. He said, ‘I want this name because Perry is an honest man. Because with all his success, he never changed. Because he will always be plain and simple and good. I would like the baby to grow up good as Perry.’

“ ‘I hope he will grow up like you,’ I said. Who could be better?’ I say this not only the wife,” she declared, very earnest. “I now it is true, because other people agrees with me. But for himself, a man is modest. Let the baby grow up like Vic and Perry together, let him be twice good. They are same kind of people with the same heart.

They plan a Christmas trip to New York show the baby to Vic’s family. He keeps them well and truly posted. The phone rings at the Farinolas’ days, it’s likely to be a bulletin from the coast. There was the time when Pier lay abed, the nurse heated a bottle in the kitchen and Perry clamored indignantly for his meal. “Darling, can you go and pick him up?” asked Pier, just like that.

He never flinched. Back he came, holding the baby as if he’d been holding babies all his life, the arm here, the hand behind the small head, the soft cheek against his, the look of heaven in his eyes and his knees knocking. Barely had the nurse taken over before he was on the phone to his folks. “I picked him up. I picked him up by myself. Now I feel like a papa.”

He knew no rest till they’d heard their grandchild’s voice. “Talk to them,” he’d coax. Perry had nothing to say. “Then cry. At least cry!” Perry was amiably silent. So when he started screaming on his own one night, Vie grabbed opportunity and phone by the forelock and, at 3:30 New York time, his mom and dad listened in rapt wonder while the baby bawled.

Ruffled panties

With three Pierangeli and four Damone sisters, everyone predicted that Pier would have a girl. Everyone sent her gifts for a girl, pink and frilly. Only from her hopeful grandmother in Rome came a shirt that was unmistakably masculine. A girl would have been just as welcome but, since Perry’s a boy, Vic glories in his maleness. “My son,” he brags, “is going to caddy for me.” Or, viewing the sturdy limbs, “You know, in six months this baby will be playing football.” He calls him Perry, no nicknames. “A boy must be treated like a boy.”

Pier’s problem is how to clothe him like a boy. Her hands caress his wardrobe. “These things are so beautiful, Vic; he has to wear them.”

“Put them away. Some day he’ll have a sister.”

Pier couldn’t wait. For his first checkup at the pediatrician’s she hatched a plot, dressing the baby before Vic got home. “It’s for nothing,” she warned him. “We’ll have to take everything off. Still, it will be a big joke on your daddy.”

Daddy arrived to find his helpless offspring decked out in ruffled panties and beribboned cap. His outrage was wonderful to behold. “I want only a diaper on my son. I want his chest to show.”

Bows and ruffles vanished. “But he is not yet Gable,” Pier pointed out. “For the chest we will put my grandmother’s shirt from Rome.”

Wrapped in plain blankets, he fared forth on his outing. “And at home,” sighs his mother, “the poor boy has to stay with a diaper and nightgown.”

Helped by Inez and Martha, two jewels, the household runs smoothly. On maid’s day out, Inez leaves food in the freezer. Such thoughtfulness isn’t essential, but it’s nice. As a cook, Pier’s repertory is limited. “I can do steak and veal scallopini, and I’m learning. To take things out of the freezer, you don’t have to learn.” Martha they value for many qualities, not least among them her respect for parents’ rights. “Sometimes,” Pier informs you, “the nurses, they keep the baby inside that room and don’t want you to touch him. Martha brings him first thing in the morning, knocks at our door and puts him in our bed. She likes that we play with him. She likes that I hold him and give him his bath and change him. I would do it anyway. But if Martha likes it, this makes a happier house.”

Early in September Valentina joined them, courtesy of Vic. Valentina’s a boxer puppy, so called because of the wellformed heart on her chest. From childhood, Pier’s been a sucker for animals—a tendency inherited from her father. But she gave up dogs because dog hair made Vic sneeze. Shortly before departing for Reno on a club date, he tumbled the pooch into her lap. “Darling, you’ll be three women alone in the house. And one man. The man is too small to protect you, so I brought a dog.”

“But, Vic, your allergy.”

“Never mind the allergy. Now the dog will look after you and I can leave in| peace.”

She eyed the squirming bundle of fur and paws, giggled to herself and, like a tactful woman, held her tongue. As she could have told him, it took three women to look after Valentina, who lived in a dream world where chair legs were meant for chewing, let alone other delusions. Mischief and all, Pier considers her an asset. So does the neighborhood. “Already she has a boy friend up the street. Every morning he comes to see her and they flirt. I think there will be a marriage.”

“Tomorrow will be time”

By the time Vic went to Las Vegas, Pier was strong enough to shuttle between husband and son. Now she’s returning. to work. You’ll see her first as guest star in Meet Me In Las Vegas. Vic does a guest spot, too, though not with Pier. She hopes like others before her, to combine motherhood successfully with the job. “But if my career interferes with my baby, then we’ll work something out. Tomorrow will be time to worry about tomorrow.

“You see,” she went on, “I am lucky because I have Vic. We will bring up the baby together. Vic’s ideas are strong and he knows the importance of the father. Once I went to his house and his four sisters were there and I saw his father had just to do this with the eyes, and it felt wonderful. It felt like I was really home. I in Italy, Vic here, we had both the same training. My father had only to look at me, and it was enough. I was never afraid of my father. I adored him because I knew he was just.

“With Vic, it’s also like that. He loves his parents so much. He wants the baby to feel about him as he feels about them. He hopes he will teach the baby what they taught him. Good and not good. Right and wrong. When he was wrong, they punished him. But always with love, and with the explanation why. We will do the same. We both don’t want to spoil our baby. We both don’t believe as some others—oh, you mustn’t say no to him, you must give him everything he wants, you mustn’t touch him. That way they come out like Indians they get fresh, they answer you. We both don’t like fresh people, Vic and me. We want our baby to have manners, not to think Ho! I am king of the world. Then when he goes in the world, it will be easier for him.”

Before their wedding, Vic went to Pier’s mother. “I promise you one thing. I will always make Anna happy.”

Pier knows that the pledge will be kept. “It isn’t hard for him. It come naturally. Vic is sensitive. He feels for the other’s feeling. If I would turn my face away and not smile, he’d say, ‘Darling, what’s the matter, please?’ If I am wrong, I tell that I’m sorry. Vic does the same. If we don’t agree, we sit down and discuss together what’s the best way. Without screaming, without hurting. There is nothing to scream about. We are grown-up people. We love each other. To love means to be kind.

“We haven’t got too much to live in this life,” little Pier added gently. “It is short and sorrow comes of itself. Why should we make more sorrow than it needs to be?”

Which requires no answer. But we’ll borrow a wish from Vic. For all three Damones, only big smiles from now on.

THE END

—BY IDA ZEITLIN

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956