Читать книгу Ernie: - Ernest Borgnine - Страница 11

All the time we were in Italy my father had been writing to my mother. “Please come home, please come home,” he’d write at least once a week. He even sent a record for the Victrola with lyrics that went, “My son, my son, my boy, my boy.”

My dad was persistent.

After a few years my mother broke down. They did love each other, and my father said he had settled down and gotten a good job and they’d live nicely. Also, once again, my poor health contributed to a move. I’d managed to come down with malaria, which was almost epidemic in coastal regions of Italy in the early 1920s. The doctors told my mother that the moist climate wasn’t good for me and I should be taken somewhere else. Connecticut seemed a good bet.

In 1923, we came back on a ship called the Dante Alighieri, which was named after the famed Italian poet, of course. Dante wrote about hell. During my passage to America, I got a taste of what that was like. The very first morning at sea my mother dressed me up in these Lord Fauntleroy clothes with a little flowing tie and a knickers suit, all hand knitted. She told me where to wait for her in the dining room and she’d be right there. I got strange looks from some of the more rough-and-tumble kids who were traveling third class, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

When I walked up this passageway I suddenly felt the ungodliest thing in my life: my stomach seemed to be knocking up against my tongue. I was immensely seasick, so I just dashed into the first room I could find. I lay on my back and in the dim light I looked up and saw this man’s face in the bunk above. He looked like Lon Chaney in makeup. And I’d woken him. I was frightened, but I was just too sick to move.

In the meantime, my mother went to the dining room expecting to see me.

“Where’s my boy, where’s my boy?” she said with increasing alarm. She began to shout that I had gone overboard.

Well, that mean-looking man had heard the commotion and, slipping from his bunk, he scooped me in his arms and took me into the bright daylight. He followed the shouting and reunited me with my mother.

My mother was so glad to see me she hugged me and hit me at the same time. I was still sick and finally threw up. My mother didn’t care. She was actually on the way back to the cabin where she had a pistol and was intending to shoot herself, convinced she had lost me.

My second punishment during the passage came when we were coming into New York Harbor. Everyone was gathered at the railing, watching as we passed the Statue of Liberty. Except me. There was a sandbox on deck, and I noticed that there was no one in it. So I went over and started to play. No sooner had I picked up a little wooden shovel than my mother grabbed my ear—so hard, in fact, that we could have skipped the hot-cold treatments to drain my ears and just had her yank them. She dragged me to the bow, put me at attention, and slapped me on the backside.

“When you see that lady, you stand at attention,” she commanded.

I’ve been standing at attention for this country ever since, believe me.