Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 14
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Mario stayed behind to sell the fixtures in the North Avenue market; Maria packed us four for the scouting trip westward, and we headed to Tucson by train to search out a place to live. I remember my sister and me hugging the window seats, watching the states unroll beside us like a vast cloth on which the feast of America was spread, cupping our hands at night against the glass until our eyes ached, sleeping curled together in our plush seats (which felt like little rooms and smelled close and spongy) as the hum and click of the track set the rhythm of our heartbeats. I remember stepping off the train four days and nights later into the freshness of early morning Tucson amid a sweeping surround of sun and cactus. I felt as if I had been suddenly given the sky.
But Maria did not see sky. Faced with the four of us amid the stark green walls of a room in a motor court, she had discovered the limits of her bravado. Stopped in full flight, she lay plunk as a sopped towel in an armchair, the tears bleeding silently down her face, while we stood with our stupefied big-baby eyes frozen beside her.
Within days we were rattling again across the prairies, switching in Chicago to the Rock Island Rocket, blazing like a railroad movie into Grand Central Station, where Maria and Mario, in whose orbit of passion we lived and moved, turned the roar on the platform into a crescendo appassionato, and fell into each other’s arms.
But for Mario there could be no stopping now, no changing, no turning back, whatever Maria’s misgivings. He had never turned back, not since he’d left Sperone, not since the day in 1921 when, in a driving rain, he had stepped onto the ship in Santa Lucia, his beloved Naples behind him, drenched in the national grief of Enrico Caruso’s funeral. Within weeks, we were packed and ready, on the road like Okies, all the stuff we could fit piled into an old Dodge and a pickup. And still my mother amazed us, driving a truck. We had never seen a woman drive a truck.
Spelling them both at the wheel was a friend who had joined them for the journey, Joe Detta, a tailor from New York, paesano, exhilarated like Mario by the romance of moving on. Joe was about my father’s age, smart, lean, hardhanded. He was a kind of immigrant Tom Joad, no wife, no kids, just a caring anarchist heart and a pure, clean passion for the road. I know he struck out for parts even farther west soon after we arrived in Tucson. Throughout our marvelous journey, even if we called him Uncle Joe for respect, we privately invoked him as “JoeDetta,” in one single, magical word. He stars in some of my vividest recollections of our first days in the Arizona desert, pointing the way like a shaman to the secrets of our astonishing new moonscape.
Above all else, that journey taught us the authority of the continent. We might pretend that we had conquered every mile as we went, but the truth was that we had also humbly yielded it up again behind us. It took our little caravan about two weeks to cross the country, counted out in Route 66 telegraph poles and Burma Shave signs with messages we kids memorized frame by frame and sang out in competitive ecstasy from the back of the car before we even got close enough to read them. Every night we seemed to drop into the very same E-Z Rest Motor Court with the railroad tracks alongside, the same fifty-five-car freight train passing at four every morning. There was the occasional wayside farmhouse that obligingly took guests, where breakfast was a full-course meal around an immense table, already surrounded by men in dungarees with the size and appetites of giants, who would gently help us load our plates from enormous bowls of potatoes and grits and chuckle about how four little kids could really eat.
Food was in every sense enormous that trip—a pure revelation of strangeness from day to day, like space itself, which seemed to have taken on a fourth dimension. I couldn’t have known the metaphysics I was in the presence of; I knew only that there was something about earth and sky both perpetual and friendless. I can remember waking up in the truck after nightfall, on a black stretch of barren Texas prairie somewhere east of El Paso, to see Dad and JoeDetta wrestling some huge thing in a ditch alongside the road, my brothers standing by, their faces lit with wonder in the circle of pink and orange light thrown by a crude fire, and my mother, behind them, lit with a fainter glow, watching with shaded eyes, unmoving. Ann still slept beside me.
The boys toiled up the embankment to tell me with a hush of excitement that it was a steer the men had just pulled, torn and bleeding, off the roadside barbed wire, a fence that had for hundreds of miles marked the impassable boundary between ranch and road. A butcher’s child, I could not yet hate this work by which my father lived, but I was at once captivated and bewildered by the almost wordless rhythm of the hard teamwork of butchering, which I had never yet been permitted to see. Survival seemed suddenly to be more amazing, extreme, and violent than I had ever imagined. For a few days after, we bypassed the Bar-B-Q stands and ate our well-carved sirloins over open campfires like the privileged children we were, digesting the ambiguities of meat and meaning together.
JoeDetta had a way of making freedom and love seem like nothing more than your plain two hands. He waited to move on until we’d found a little rented bungalow off the main road south of Tucson, hanging on maybe a month or so until we were settled, repairing the truck’s broken axle and hunting wild quail and bringing a brace back for supper, all with that innocent, unthankable air of doing what needed doing. He taught us about the stars, when the sky that had hung so bright and hot and close all day seemed to curve indifferently away from us at night like a great black dome pricked with light holes.
The older three of us had started school (albeit reluctantly, sorry to leave the day school of JoeDetta) at a little two-room schoolhouse out beyond the desert flats, and were coming back from our first day when he met us at the porch, little wide-eyed Ann beside him. I was full of my first-day story. I had just set my dusty foot on the porch step, ready to announce that the teacher had said I counted so well I could move one row over to the second grade, when Joe said he’d killed a rattlesnake, and did we want to see it?
We’d been warned about rattlers; it was their desert, really. But none of us had actually seen or heard one, and we followed him eagerly, fearlessly, as we always did, and the instant he said, “There,” we froze. Out of the brush came the chattering sound we’d been told of, and my first thought was that the creature Joe had killed had miraculously come back—the desert, to me, already full of miracles enough for such a thing—but no, there lay the dead snake, flat in the footpath. What we’d heard was another, a second one, and then we saw it, magnificently coiled and arched and hissing noisily two or three yards away, poised to strike if anyone dared to touch the poor dead thing lying stiff and papery in the dust. “She’s his mate,” Joe whispered simply, laying a firm hand on my arm, and we backed away, leaving the dead snake untouched.
I did not ask how he knew, or how he knew she was a she. JoeDetta knew such things, and the tone of sorrow and tenderness in his voice became a key, unlocking the snakey universe and all its tragedies forever.
Tucson, in those days, still at least a decade away from the Sun Belt, was nothing more than a cow town with a college. It had had its moment of Depression-era fame, when the Feds had caught Dillinger there in a famous bank-robbing shootout. That was before he’d become Public Enemy Number One, while he still had a grip on the popular mind as an outlaw hero. For us—as for him, I suppose—it was still the romantic Wild West, its few dusty intersections lying open to the unguarded chances of fate and adventure. But the romance had its menace. Around us stretched a bleak sand sea, harsh and hostile, the tall saguaro cactus marching away in files like an occupying army to a vanishing point in the flanks of the Catalina Mountains. And everything—and everyone—on this earth, under this new and inexorable sun, seemed blond or blonding: the houses built of adobe sand cakes, the tin-roofed cement squats hunkered down beside the runoff ditches along the roads, the roads themselves, the tanned hills holding up the sky like mounds of cornflakes, even the crouching little cacti looking bleached and crisp, disguising their pulpy innards. Only we were not blond, and the Chicanos, and the Indians who sought shaded street corners from which to sell their wares, the bracelets I loved that tumbled in rippling rivers of blue and silver across their blankets.
Was I feeling what my father felt? Ten years before this westward trek, the already reinvented Mario Salvatore had invented himself again as an American. Proud, even smug in the faintly accented but flawless grammar of his American English, he had become a citizen with the zeal of a newly baptized convert entering the Church. Everything—his studied knowledge of American politics, his dedication to Republican self-reliance, even his devotion to baseball—had seemed preparation for a future symbolized by the Golden West, had made the troubles of the Old World seem ancient and inconsequential.
And then Mussolini dragged Italy into the war on the Axis side and Mario felt the shame he couldn’t escape. Even his shoulder hurt again, where the shrapnel still lodged from the Alto Adige campaign. Digging in, he declared himself an American, and went to a nearby defense plant looking for work. And now, after fifteen years proving he wasn’t gangster, anarchist, mafioso, wop, he was suddenly belligerent, enemy alien—new names to cut him with like a steer in the barbed wire. So much for the America of the beckoning future. He took up his pen. In righteous anger, in his fine hand and perfect grammar, he wrote his complaint to President Roosevelt. Then he went on, uncertainly tossing about for work. Maria seemed to feel even more displaced. Her naturally shadowed eyes had become deep pools of longing from which he knew tears fell at night in the dark. Should he go back? What was there for him now if he did? In his life-odyssey, you always went forward. Back meant failure. It was closed for him, closed as water.
The two of them schemed about another business they might begin independently, what they had perhaps hoped to do from the start. For a time he found work in town with a prosperous grocer who seemed to understand his plight. Afternoons, my mother would sometimes pile us into the truck and take us to visit him. We would prowl the store while she shopped, slipping comic books stealthily from the racks and sneaking off to read them because it was something he hated to see us do.
The day waned, the palm trees cast long shadows across the tiled front plaza. I waited eagerly for his workday to be done, sitting on a low little wall and watching him, the prince of my Oedipal romance, pushing the day’s dust across the pink herringbone bricks with a long-handled broom.
I think it must have been then, more than ever, that he began to dream of Italy again—of mother, motherland, mother tongue—dreams that both salved and corroded his heart. We must learn to speak Italian, he told us. He schooled us with proper little black-and-white-bound composition books for vocabulary and verbs, and burst into rages when we came to our drills reluctant or unprepared. My mother would gladly have done this, and spared him by teaching us herself—she loved to teach—but no, her Italian was a despised Sicilian dialect bastardized by a generation in New York. She sewed instead, cocking an ear to our stormy lessons and attacking her machine more zealously than ever. A superb dressmaker, she had once vaulted to principal draper for Bergdorf Goodman in the palmy career days before her marriage. Now she had begun quietly to sell her sophisticated skills altering fine clothes for the wives of the rancher gentry.
And it was then that my father’s Italy became a place imprinted on the platen of my soul. Forever after this, to go there meant a return somehow to a place already known and loved, a place we might have danced to on the airs of his cherished operas. His lessons were not always harsh. Sometimes he would forget to drill us and fill an hour instead with tales of home. He was a storyteller born. In a single sensual gesture of language or a hand lightly playing on the air, he could catch just that icy freshness of spring water in the heat of summer, the cool of overhanging chestnut trees, the burst of a succulent fig on the tongue, the scorch-scent of pinecones tossed on the fire to release their pearly nuts, the majesty of a long, snaking processional to the shrine at Montevergine as the village begged the Blessed Mother to intercede in illness or war. He could remember climbing the well-ribbed flank of Vesuvius to peer into her churning mouth, and he laid his boyish fear and courage on our hearts.
He would tell us about how it had been to be the first of fourteen children, run out of fingers counting them. Fourteen! I could not imagine being one of fourteen, when to be one of four already seemed so many. And he had not even been the first. Two infants had died before him. The wise women of his village had told his mother, the beautiful grandmother we had never known, that she’d lost them because she was too tender and hovering, too protective. “Lascialo andá!”—“Let him go!” they’d admonished her whenever he pressed his rubbery baby legs into her lap, eager to fly. And so, he said, she had finally “tossed him into the road” as soon as he could crawl, and he laughed, as if to say, “And so you see, now!” And so we saw.
And how proud he was of me, his smartest girl, when I said my Italian vowels roundly, and rolled my rs (and yet it came so easily to me!). How enchanting he was when he wasn’t angry or dull or withdrawn into his grief, or boiling with some scheme that would pave his way—and ours—with gold. So I could not separate him from Italy or from love, the unresisting love of a girl-child for her father’s sorrowing eyes.
But fuse that love with fear, even fear of love—a fusion like those wax images sealed between two disks of glass one sometimes sees in collections of Roman antiquities, the mysterious art that once welded them together now completely lost.
I am eight, and in love. It is dinnertime; the family is gathered around the table. Outside our house, in the yard, I know there is a desert wind rustling the cottonwood trees, but I can barely hear it because my brothers are taunting me, demanding that I tell the name of the boy I love. They do not mean this to torment me only. My father is already scowling. We cannot tell which of us is wounding his dark olive eyes.
The boy I love is not dark. He is as white and gold as moonlight on sand. Even his name is white: Charlie White. I tell it over to myself secretly, like a spell.
My father calls me to him after supper. “Who is this boy you love at school?” he asks, with just that crucifying touch of scorn on the word love. But the name fights back. It is as though there is a danger in my mouth, and only the whitest white silence can protect it.
“Tell me his name,” he says. All gentleness has been emptied from his voice, and he says, “If you won’t tell, you must never speak to me again.” I know this is a game. I look at him, astonished, trying to find the playful message in his face, in a twitch of mouth or eyebrow. But I am thinking, I cannot tell, and you cannot mean to shut me away with your silence—not for such a little thing! His indifference is enthralling. Near him in the dark, I read every curve of his body hungrily for a sign. I wish I had his pen now; I could so easily draw the face outlined by lamplight, the sinuous line easily embracing the fine, sad profile, the black hair silvering above the shapely ears.
A half hour goes by. It is made of thirty separate and unbearable minutes, I have counted them, and they are forever enough. I go to him, not daring to touch even his sleeve. When he lifts his head and turns it toward me his faraway glance is tender, and a delirious sense of salvation catches at my throat.
I ask him what he is writing. He shows me a letter in Italian, to his sister Irena in Striano, a village near Sperone. I think of Italy, the village, the aunt, his sister, I have never seen, her children, my cousins. But he has not forgotten his warning. “Now you have spoken,” he says, with dark and terrible finality. My brain is blinded with disbelief. More than ever now I will not tell him. I am stunned by this new power my father’s love has over me, dazed by the superb and violent cunning of his jealousy.
“Write it,” he says calmly.
I take the pen from his hand, meaning to resist, but the tip presses itself to the white sheet. I tell myself it is a name, a silly name, Charlie White, but in the wind I can hear it fall and see it break into dust and scatter and lose itself among the trees.
Perhaps less guiltily than I later thought he should have, my father began to leave a book about the house, face down to mark his place, a book with a green baize library binding plainly imprinted in white and a straightforward title like Managing the Squab Farm, full of line drawings of various pigeon breeds and poor-quality photos exhibiting the layouts of sheds.
All this seemed to go from print to reality like the swift turning of a movie page. We moved from our little bungalow into a bigger one on a rather bald and dusty road, oddly named Fair Oaks Drive. The house itself seemed clattery and somewhat the worse for wear, but it had a pebbled horseshoe driveway in the front, bordered with great, green, shaggy rhododendrons and oleanders that lent it a sheltered look, and in the back, shading the barn and two long rows of tin-roofed pigeon sheds, a majestic phalanx of cottonwood and eucalyptus trees.
Soon enough we children learned of the miracle of bird and egg and how they did increase and multiply, and how suddenly and ruthlessly they died, got plucked, and on the third day were sent off to be eaten. And then it wasn’t long before the pigeons were joined by ducks and chickens and turkeys, making an only slightly profitable enterprise slightly more profitable. And since, unlike the pigeons, these forlorn creatures wandered about the yard pecking at the gravel and playfully attacking us, and were as often accused of misdemeanors as we were, we inevitably endeared them with names and made them our friends.
But it was not a playful business. Squab farming was hard and dirty and demanding, and Lou and Carlo were soon recruited into the feeding and cleanup when they were not at school. Eventually the slaughter, too. At first they may have thought it a perverse adventure. But it was brutal work to break the necks of baby birds, and it didn’t take long for the ugliness to spread itself, dreary and awful, on their souls. I am amazed to remember how the fall of a single infant sparrow from its nest in the porch roof was a catastrophe the four of us rushed to like a battle-field medical-surgical unit, how we would take turns wrapping it in warmed towels and nursing it with an eyedropper, and when it died, which it always did, bury it in the garden with a little Popsicle-stick cross, every one of us weeping, my brothers no less than my sister and me. But this childish reparation could not lift the stone of guilt from off their daily little murders. Denial soon passed into sullen resistance, and when this roused my father’s anger to sterner discipline, the two boys began to scheme how they might run away.
I would not have known this except that I had taken refuge one afternoon in a favorite spot of mine for reading, a comfortable crotch in a branch of a great cottonwood tree at the back of the yard. Like some Nancy Drew storybook heroine, I simply overheard them, hunkered down together behind one of the pigeon sheds, conspiring. Their plans seemed already far advanced. They’d built small wagons out of old wooden crates and discarded baby-carriage wheels, crammed them with cereals and tins of soup and beans, and hidden them behind the barn. They even had rifles and gunpowder-makings (my genius brother Lou having researched the formula), and a supply of .22-caliber bullets, though they swore later they would not have killed a rabbit unless they were starving. Lou had talked a friend into joining them, Billy, a neighborhood kid who shared his dogeared Zane Grey novels and seemed to have a natural hormonal reservoir of thirteen-year-old discontent. The three of them were wild when they realized I knew what they were up to. I cried desperately, not out of fear, but at the thought of their going forever. I swore I would never give them away, not even under torture, and I meant it.
But my honor was never put to the test, my father never dreaming I could be part of such a heinous plot. I lay in my bed on the screened porch, listening to the caravan creakily depart in the dark before dawn with my heart pounding so loud in my chest I thought it could wake the house. But the boys were miles away before my father missed them, and they were miles farther on before he understood what it meant. My mother begged him to be calm, but she was no match for his bellowing rage. She herself was caught between fear of his wrath and the plain, crushing truth that her sons had also left her. Billy’s father was drawn into the search. They headed the old pickup into the Catalinas along the route he and the boys had taken the previous Christmas, when they’d braved snow to cut trees to sell on city street corners, guessing now that this was the familiar road the boys would trust. And sure enough, by nightfall they found them, huddling around their campfire high in the mountains, some twenty miles away.
Lou was thirteen, his voice just beginning to break, Carlo only ten, shy, undergrown, with a sickliness that left him still a kind of baby. I could hear the small, uneven duet of their strangled sobs even as the truck crunched into the drive in the deep of the night, and my father pushed them out into the yard and into the barn. Then their howls of pain, punctuated by his choking staccato monotone of rage. He whipped Carlo first and sent him into the house, then tied Lou to a post and flogged him again and again, until the sun rose and lay full and plain over the desert and all one heard at last was the silence, even of the birds.
I had lain through the night in a stupor of disbelief, struggling to understand. How could he inflict a pain of which he seemed never to get enough? How could he bear it? How could my mother, who would flinch at the sight of a splinter in the palms of our hands? She must have drugged herself, stoned herself to death with prayer, devised some lie of the mind, some mercifully self-annihilating belief that this was happening to her, that she was merely surrendering blindly to her own punishment. How did I bear it? You could not drive the sobbing sound out of your head, no matter how much noise you made crying into the pillow, no matter how you stopped your ears with the sheets. It was as if I were there with them in that dim-lit barn, had seen it happening. It wasn’t possible, he would never have let me, and yet I think I still see them there where we were not allowed to go, not even to bring them water. I see her, whispering into her rosary, her throat tight and dry with exhausted grief, the crystal beads wedged between her thumbs, and her heart a lump of volcanic ash still too hot for the tears she wept to be wet.
When you are a child, when you are told to step over and around the corpse on the carpet, you do it. The corpse in this case was not just my father’s cruelty but his misery, the livid bestial frustration and selfish panic at who knows what world lost, darkened still more by my mother’s complex of self-sacrifice and guilt at somehow having dealt him this fate. The moral bearings of all these things escaped me. I needed to love my parents. I needed to forgive them. I began faintly to grasp at a solacing if still bewildering truth that there was a link between our family’s lives, which had in earlier days seemed for all their tumult so much our own, and that mysterious, dim other universe of wars and national hatreds. This world, which came at us in wonderful alliterative warnings like “loose lips sink ships” and bloodthirsty jingles about Hitler and Mussolini and Tojo blithely sung in the school playground, in hearty exhortations to do your part for the war effort—which we kids translated into fishing through dirt heaps for scrap metal and turning in our brown copper pennies for white ones—had just that airy false optimism and dark undertow I still connect with the comic radio of Jack Benny and Fibber McGee. We didn’t know enough to call it history, but whatever its name was, we knew we lived in it. It did not forgive. It did not explain. But it said, You don’t understand, my dear little girl, because there is so much, so much, to understand.
And it seemed to speak sometimes in the nasally voice of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for even if he had not replied to my father’s letter in his own person, there appeared the sudden fact that something in the war had changed, Italy had joined the Allies, and that the same Italians who’d been scorned on Wednesday were back on Thursday in the good graces of the American government. If with equal suddenness a place for Mario’s fine Italian hand was found on the defense equipment finishing line in a plant just outside of Tucson, it did not seem so entirely amazing or far-fetched to think the president had personally interceded. Mario, vindicated, took his place painting insignias on warplanes, spending much of his day on his back or squirming around on elbows and hips, like Michelangelo under the Sistine ceiling.
Beware the wish granted, by gods or presidents. Unlike Michelangelo, Mario was steeped in a dense bath of chemical solvents and paint fumes. Within six months he was deathly ill.
He wandered about the house at first, perplexed at the willful refusal of his own body. He worked intermittently, when his strength came. He sought out healers who were baffled by his illness, and got slowly thinner and weaker.
The chores of the pigeon farm had to go on without him. My brothers told me secretly that Lou had devised a way to anesthetize the birds before killing them, with a thin needle inserted behind the skull. It was no more than a kind of delusionary triage. Even if he could get to the infant birds in time, the hapless chickens and ducks couldn’t be spared, and at holiday market time dozens of them still squawked, in brutal scenes of madcap slaughter, headless and bleeding about the yard.
The most terrible death was that of a spangled Japanese Bantam rooster, whose dawn crowing had become as familiar a part of our lives as the cooing of the pigeons at twilight. We called him “Nip-on-knees” because if you got too close to his hens he would sneak-attack you with his beak at what it was funny to think of as the Pearl Harbor level of your anatomy. When his time came to die for somebody’s fricassee, my sister and I suffered so vocally that my mother declared all Bantam-slaying over. She could make such ultimatums now, though she’d never have admitted—in deference to my father, would never have dared think—she ruled the roost. But he had taken to his bed, and though he still gave orders from his closed and unapproachable room, we could tell he was growing less and less able to police how well they might be filled.
Probably in response to a gloomy epistle of my mother’s complaining that everything that could go wrong had, my Aunt Mildred, Spagnola sister number four, wrote us that winter. “I’m coming,” she declared, and she did, arriving from the East one day like a sunrise. Maybe she was having her own life crisis, or had reached an impassable plateau in her career. Or maybe she had simply, selfishly, imagined that any visit out here, to the land of eternal sunshine, had to be a vacation. But that was Aunt Mildred; you could never tell, as she unpacked her seventy-seven halter tops, what she did to please you from what she did to please herself.
Like all her sisters, Mildred was in the fashion trades. Or like and unlike them. They say the eldest, May (really Gandolfa, the same who had never quite forgiven Maria the injury of catching a husband before her), had already destroyed her eyes beading by the time she married Dante, that improbably named pretty-boy of hers—a man I remember from my later years in East Harlem as always mysteriously pale and well-shaven, and never to be seen on the tenement stairs before noon on weekdays in his trademark soft fedora and silk tie. Next came my mother, Maria—called Mary at home—with her promising berth at Bergdorf before Mario carried her away. And then Teresa, who had followed Mary into a similarly promising career before she’d met and married her fine, patrician-looking cousin, Louis.
But Mildred, who had slapped a kind of movie star moniker over her own original Carmela and effectively passed, had outshone them all, going into fashion design and making it at the Seventh Avenue cutting edge. Not black-haired and Arab-African-looking like all the others, but sandy red–haired like Papa Calogero and hazel-eyed like nobody (in that anciently mixed-up, who-knows-what-you-will-get way of the children of Sicily, an island trod by every race since time began), she even had the high cheekbones and air of cool command that could put you in mind of Dietrich in the right light. She knew what to wear, and how and when to wear it. On her own sewing machine, fitted on her own dressmaker’s dummy, she made things rich women died for. And she was still single and flaunted it.
The relatively recent buzzword for this particular form of cool was glamour, which had begun to denote something, some irresistibly feminine, Coco Chanel sort of something that even women who were powerful and career-oriented could have—or maybe that only women who were powerful and career-oriented could have. I knew she had it, whatever it was, the moment she stepped down off that transcontinental express in Tucson and set her open-toed sandals on the station platform. And I wanted it, too.
She also had a certain starry look in her eyes. My first thought was that the glamour and the starry look went together, not understanding that they were actually antithetical, as things often are that follow one another as cause and effect and so for a single confounding moment show up in the same place. We kissed and hugged and cried for joy, and Mildred said how amazed she was to see what a pack of four little Indians her sister was raising, and so on. But it wasn’t long before she let out that she had met her dream man on that train, someone by the totally southern American name of Ferril Dillard, a tall, blond, beautiful Alabama soldier-boy coming west with his platoon to be trained for combat in the Japanese theater of war.
If there was one being in those mid-war days who was even more glamorous than a Seventh Avenue fashion plate, it was a man in uniform. And this Ferril Dillard turned out on sight to be really delectable, a kind of blond Elvis before there was an Elvis, with baby blues and a crooning sort of drawl and a funny joyous fatalism that was such a contrast with the rather dark kind we’d grown up with that I fell half in love with him myself. He came to visit on weekends before going overseas, and brought us things, and courted and cuddled up more and more to Aunt Mildred, and she, who was so tough and smart and self-possessed when he wasn’t around, turned into a kind of backlit American Beauty rose at a garden show, and just smiled and smiled.
My father, I’m sure, had his dark doubts about what was afoot, or what might actually come of this whirlwind courtship. But he was already too sick and bed-bound to raise a fuss over somebody who had actually shown up to give Maria a hand. And if he didn’t like to encourage marriage to this totally un-Italian Alabaman, even less did he like the idea of Mildred’s having a fling without it. So he played resident patriarch as best he could, and Aunt Mildred, not especially chafed by his watchdogging, settled into Tucson “for the duration,” as they said, or as much of it as it took.
There were moments of total misty absence of eye contact when you could tell she was thinking about him. But she not only loved us kids, but truly adored my mother, and most of the time Mildred was with us she was actually with us, a kind of celebrity big sister, dolled up and ready for her public, prancing around in shorts, showing off the trademark family good legs in bobby sox and platform heels. It was she who taught me about making a statement with lipstick, of which she had at least nine equally brilliant shades in expensive cases. And when she wasn’t lending a hand with the shopping or the wash or the cooking, or conspiring with my mother over some fine seam on the sewing machine, she would slather herself all over in cocoa butter (the smell of it can still pull the memory of her, like a genie, out of a jar) and throw herself down in the sun in her glamorous red bare-midriff swimsuit for a good hour’s tan.
And whenever Ferril had a short furlough, she dazzled him, and he dazzled her, and before you know it she was pinning together a cream-colored satin dress on the mannequin, and they were married in a quick and simple ceremony that was part of what came in those days with men going off to war. And then he went off to war, and they had a baby on the way.
Mildred never had another child. Thinking back, I can understand why. I was much too protected to be let in on the medical aspect of her condition when I was a girl, but I know she went a terribly long time giving birth. And I remember my sister and I being steered away from her until well after it was over.
She’d gone into labor the night before the night before Christmas. When we were finally allowed to see her, her face looking drained—and astonishingly lipstickless—there was all the same such a lustrous glory in her eyes that I thought her delight in her child must at least be proportional to her difficulty in getting it out of her body. It was a girl, a very tiny girl, born deep in the night of Christmas Eve, sleeping in a bassinet off to the side of her bed when we came enchanted and whispering into the room.
My mother and she had spent months playing with names, but Mildred threw it all over and completely surprised her. “Starr,” she announced, when asked. Maria kissed her cheek and smiled her most winsome smile. We all smiled. The whole issue of naming, now that we had left the Old World with its heavy burden of the deaths of ancestors, seemed to be thrown wide open. And Starr, in this context, could arguably be said to have had a basis in scripture. But for Mildred as for her tribe, only the road of excess could lead to the palace of wisdom, and a single allusion to the triumph of giving birth on O Holy Night would never be enough. “Starr Carol,” she corrected herself archly, looking a little, I thought, like a cat who has stuck her paw in the cream, again.
Maria expressed content by finding her least ironical smile and smiling it, and was just blowing her nose into a hankie when Mildred added, “Noel,” and forced her black eyebrows to shoot up again. Ann and I laughed and then clapped our hands over our mouths. Our mother shot a glance our way and then turned back to Mildred. Jokingly, she asked, “Any more names?”
“Of course,” said Mildred, wincing slightly as she shifted her weight in the bed. “Starr Carol Noel Dillard.” She pronounced it as if she had just locked in her baby’s claim to a platoon of harmonizing angels, and in that full, long, magical string you could hear the self-satisfaction of the Spagnola woman who has already got pretty much everything she ever wanted out of her man, and then some.
With a few exceptions, my sister Ann figures so little in the experiences I most remember about early Tucson that I have wondered if she was still too young to be part of them, apron-tied at home while every day my brothers and I adventurously (I thought) crossed a stretch of desert to our schoolhouse, a mile away. I am sure I strove to distance myself from her babyhood—even her girlness—in my longing to be taken seriously by my brothers, whose boy-freedom I envied and whose boy-daring I wanted to emulate.
But it was a continuous struggle: the more I sought them, the more they avoided me. As we followed the footpath home from school they would dart ahead or straggle behind, roaring for joy whenever an unpredictable finger of some evolutionary anomaly called “jumping cactus” flung itself at my head and grabbed one of my thick black braids, or stuck me full on the backside through my shorts, driving me to tearful despair, as if the whole Arizona universe were conspiring to punish me for being a girl.
The family called me “Fluffy,” to make matters worse. It was meant endearingly, a baby name that had hung on as such names do, and my mother used it with an especially tender affection that my little sister echoed. But still, it was a silly, lapdog sort of a name. And especially since my own body made itself laughable and awkward, it could be used against me. I could not seem to shed my baby fat no matter how tomboyishly I ran and played dodgeball and climbed trees. People might patronize me as “pleasingly plump,” but I was never fooled. I had to face it. The plain fact was I loved to eat. Not all of it went to fat, of course. By the time I was eight or nine I was also bigger and stronger than Lou, who was actually rather scrawny and bookish, and I was a giant compared with Carlo, whose misery nickname was the Runt. But to my brothers, I was forever Fat Fluffky. And they knew that the moment they skewered me with that name, I would disappear, hurt and humiliated.
Only the movies brought us together. My father, who ranked Saturday matinees lower than comic books as moral minefields for the impressionable young, must have made an exception for Walt Disney’s Dumbo, or else a restless, pregnant Aunt Mildred had prevailed over his house rule. He was right. Once we had seen that absurdly sweet and doleful, wing-eared circus elephant, we couldn’t get him out of our minds or our bodies. All Lou had to do, when the four of us were cleaning up after supper, was give the signal, and we would jump together and stack ourselves acrobatically on the kitchen floor, me at the bottom holding up the other three.
My brothers made no secret of how impressed they were with this performance of supergirl strength. For a few heavenly weeks I was their buddy. Now and then they would cut me in on a devilish plot, just so I could display my quisling subjection.
Like the day we decided to poison my sister. It was really the silliest ploy in the book. Ann was six, nearly seven, and even if she was tiny and naïve, she was nobody’s fool. The new bars of bluing my mother had begun to use for soaking the bed sheets out in the wringer-tub in the yard were stamped into break-off squares like a Hershey bar, but they were actually blue. When I told her this was a new kind of chocolate she was really going to like, she wasn’t tricked in the least, and said firmly, “It is not.”
Somebody, maybe my mother herself, had said that whatever those bluing cubes were made of could poison you, or at least make you blind, but I still urged Ann to try one. “Try it yourself,” she said, pushing me away, sure that if it was candy and as tasty as all that, I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to share it. But I held her and tried to force it to her lips, just as my mother abruptly came in from the yard and my brothers crawled sniggering from behind the couch and scurried out the door. Ann grabbed her around the knees. “They were trying to poison me!”
My mother glared at me hard, snatching the package out of my hand and reassuring Ann in a voice tight with banked anger. I had watched the boys disappear, and stood there, paralyzed, yet weirdly awake. Ann protested that I had really tried. She was right. I had, to buy an instant of my brothers’ admiration. “They wouldn’t have let you, darling,” my mother had said. But I knew what I knew, and it was like sudden carnal knowledge.
She lay now in the safe circle of my mother’s arms, her hair stroked and kissed, as I slipped guiltily out and across the yard and scrambled into the familiar splayed branch of the cottonwood tree, my own gut tumbling and aching as if I had poisoned myself. Time passed. The screen door swung gently open from the enclosed back porch where Ann and I usually slept together. I could see her tiny shape, in her little blue and white pinafore, emerge tentatively into the yard. Her feet were bare. A mass of hair had escaped from her braids and sprung into irregular loose brown curls around her dusky face. Her face was all wide-open eyes, searching the fading light.
I knew she was looking for me. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time.
I am glad not to have been a mother then. It was struggle enough to learn to be a motherly child. Nothing declared the impotency of parenting more than an apocalyptic Arizona rainstorm, when, after days—weeks—eternities of blanching and relentless blue skies and flaming sunsets, of long, blue-velvet nights flagrant with moonlight, a switch would be thrown on the universe, and rain and wind would flash across the desert, shutting down the world in a solid wall of water and erasing connection to anyone out of the reach of your arms.
My mother, who had a houndlike vigilance about danger (a sixth sense in her, literally, almost as overdeveloped as her sense of smell, which was legendary), would gladly have raised cowards, I think, just to be sure we’d hide safely under our beds like puppies when the power-rains came down. But her sons had just that bit of the blind, gambler’s daring of their father that seemed to have got us to Arizona in the first place, and even something of his queer taste for rousing and then flouting her womanish terrors. When the rain exploded out of the skies that famous year of Aunt Mildred, as suddenly as the lightning plunged into that live radiant soup of September heat, the boys rallied against all cries and dove into the flashing water like crocodiles, disappearing from sight before they had left the horseshoe drive, even before the smashing rain had carromed their reckless whoops and yelps out of the air.
We women and girls stood by, arms helplessly outstretched. But not all of us wanted to stop them. I wanted to be with them, to leap barefoot and bare-chested into that air ocean and let my eyesight be shattered by the sheer force of water and the rain pelt my back like bullets, as I had seen it pelt theirs, and dart and dance into the running river of the road. Here in the house the rain hammered on the metal roof, the wind drove sudden gushes of water at the windows. We could imagine the birds in their screened refuges soaked right through their oily feathers, hunkered down into soft balls, huddling together for comfort as the rushing rain drove deep new freshets into the dirt floor of the sheds. But they were safe, and would not fly, like boys, into the wall of water.
Had she known Carlo was in danger of drowning in a gully before she knew he’d been rescued, my mother might have died, just from the sheer fact of being helpless to save him. Something just that quixotic lay between the two of them, a deep tenderness she felt for his vulnerable smallness, he with that seemingly inarticulate yearning to be her boy, her only boy—to be, in fact, her man. With so much of her family’s strange witchcraft coded into acts of naming and renaming, perhaps there had been the magic of the patronymic he was blessed with as second son, singularly entitled to carry the name of her beloved Papa—or the elegant variation of it acceptable to my father. For Carlo, too, she would have stopped a bullet, a hundred times.
I think he knew he had this hold on her, that he lived and moved within the safety of its possession. Sickly and small, he had first survived pneumonia as an infant (one of our oft-repeated family miracles), then, with Lou, a scarlet fever that had left them both afflicted with the same fever-weakened eyesight. But Lou’s owlish glasses made him look the genuine budding genius, while Carlo’s lay as heavy and huge in his tiny face as the optics of a bottle fly. He clowned, he tricked, he teased, he ruthlessly taunted my sister and me, he did whatever he was told not to. He became ever more the mischievous little scapegrace as he grew. My father, his heart increasingly darkened and sore, felt baited, and even from his sickbed gave him the full brunt of a military, withering scorn. And the more he gave, the more Carlo seemed to want, to taunt him to give, as if it were a drug for which he had developed a habit, or as if it had become the dark side of my mother’s unconditional and enabling love, which could deny him nothing, forgive him everything.
But that day, when they brought him home half-dead, the shriek she shrieked could have stopped your heart. The sun had already burst through the clouds again and was beating the soaked earth into smoke when the whole posse of them abruptly appeared at the bottom of the drive, Lou and the neighborhood boys leading the way. Behind them walked the gas station man from down the road, Carlo lying across his arms as limp as a bolt of wet muslin. We knew he was alive. As they drew closer, we could hear him grotesquely weeping against his chattering teeth in a parody of his own impish laughter, see him wanly waving his brown little legs as if he wanted to run, as if he’d been caught and not rescued.
But he was safe, safe, safe, everyone reassured her! Yet she could not stop wailing in terror-exaggerated pain. And yet I knew she indulged her passion, her fury, and did not drop down dead at the sight of him, because by Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and all the holy saints, even if he was half-dead, he was still alive.
The boys grabbed excitedly at their breath as they told us that the rain had already stopped pounding, and was just beginning to sift down straight through the sunlight, when Carlo had taken it into his head to breast the wild water flooding the drain ditches in streams as wide and boiling as rivers. He’d been caught, swept into a culvert pipe under the crossroad by the gas station. Lou had lunged forward and grabbed and held him by the wrists, screaming for help as he threw himself across the embankment, but without the strength to wrench him out against the force of the current. There was nothing to do but resist it, the two of them one body, arms tearing at shoulders, until the other boys came and made a chain and held them both back from the flood rushing into the great pipe. And then the garage man with his strong back and forearms had come and just reached down and yanked Carlo out.
For a few moments my mother simply took him in her arms, and, weeping, laid him across a blanket in her lap, took his head between her hands and kissed the streaky wet hair. His chest bled where it had been thrashed against the arch of the culvert, the fine brown-gold skin stripped away from throat to navel. He howled with pain coughing the foul, coffee-colored water out of his choking lungs, and she wept, we all wept, in pity for him. But he was alive. The saints had kept him alive.
Still, it was a deathblow, the last shimmering spike in my mother’s feeling for this beautiful and cursed place—a feeling that from the beginning had never been love. Ever on the watch for signs, she lost no time in reading this one, as she had my father’s slow decline, only without doubt or equivocation. Even as we moved through our own slow gulfs of childhood time, increasingly haunted by the thinning form we caught only in occasional scaring glimpses when the bedroom door was left ajar, we knew conferences were held, plans made; we felt a nameless danger, sensed a new horizon of hope.
Aunt Mildred, restless for independence, perhaps superstitious enough to be repelled by the morbid sadness of our house, had moved out and nested into special single blessedness at the back of her own shop in town until the Christmas baby arrived, and then into a special kind of madonna-with-child blessedness afterwards. She turned a small income from cutting and draping and stitching her artful fashions, drawing on Ferril’s army pay and what was left of her savings, finding her niche, content to wait out her soldier in the Arizona sunshine.
She was still a mesmerizing sight for two little girls whenever she visited the squab farm. From the somewhat sprung-out armchair in the family room, our eavesdropping perch on the kitchen, we could see, as she moved the baby from shoulder to shoulder, that she was cultivating a slightly blowsy Rita Hayworth look now, self-consciously tossing her mass of brassy gold hair out of the way, and dodging carefully as my mother careered about the room. Both of them seemed caught in an instinctive dance of frenetic Spagnola energy, rapt in jolted, telegraphic conversation filled with hushed allusions to doctors in the East.
It snowed the following winter in Tucson, for the first time in fifty years. The snowflakes floated out of a lowering gray sky like fine volcanic ash and sublimed back into the air almost before they had dusted the earth. In my anguished and misremembering mind’s eye it is all one image—the vanishing snow, my father taken from the house on a stretcher that then lifts so lightly into the train it seems to be empty, the sighing train heaving itself away as if it could feel pain.
The farm vanishes, the birds, the splayed cottonwood tree. For a very little time we seem to be with my aunt and the Christmas baby with the lovely Disney name, my little sister and I, together, climbing up and down the dust pile in her parking lot, collecting bits of scrap metal for the war effort.
And then the lights behind the big blue sky go quietly dark.
