Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 15

3

My father’s illness, the key that unlocks the mystery of this childhood experience of the West, is itself a palimpsest erased and told again so many times that it is no longer possible to say of it, “This is the truth.”

I remember with an embarrassing rush of nostalgic joy how as a girl, even as a young woman, I imagined that I knew the truth and would always know it, that truth itself was drawn to me—loved me, discovered me the way the wind itself did, roughly caressing my face—that somehow great mysteries locked to others would open obligingly to my unconquerable mind. I dreamed dreams of flying, too, so real and convincing that I would swear I could step off the sill of my bedroom window in broad daylight and float at will, twenty or thirty feet above the lawn.

I cannot fly, nor do I know what the truth is. I cannot tell my story as linear history, as if it were a chain of cause and effect defying ambiguity, or play it like a musical score. Even to tell the truth as it was for me then—tell it and leave it alone—seems a luxury. How much truth is possible—not just within the range of my own capabilities, but within the conventions of this confessional mode? Am I allowed, slowly or suddenly, to peel away the layers of discovery in strategically timed revelations as they did in fact come to me in real time?

This is not a novel, though I might sometimes wish it were. And because it is called “true,” who knows whether such mysteries and gaps are licensed by the contract between the one who writes and the one who reads what is written? I strive to recover what I felt as a child, but my story does not therefore become the diary of a child’s life. It remains the self-reflective account of a woman for whom childhood is half a century old, a woman who has, for years in fact, been pondering the archeological and meta-archeological dynamics of memory and truth. And so I know, as surely you know too, that as I write I bring with me not just “the truth as it was for me then,” but knowledge laid over it time and time again, each layer not merely structuring fresh feelings about the facts I already knew, forging new tools of memory with which to recover new “facts,” but reconfiguring the very way all subsequent events, thought to be already explained and understood, are presented to the mind to be explained and understood again. And so it is memory’s curious trick to have knowledge be not singular—one knowledge, one truth, standing straight and upright in place of memories proven false or imprecise—but many knowledges, able like ghosts to somehow disregard the law of the conservation of matter and occupy the same place at the same time.

These memory-ghosts most haunt me here, where my story veers back upon itself. The ghosts stand, immovable, not-quite-cast-out old versions, not-quite-vanished plausibilities in some curiously reflexive relation to one another. It is as if my life is an archive from which nothing can be taken or destroyed, whose mission it is to preserve all the beautiful dreams of the way things were. Or a synoptic gospel, each version equally true, or equally credible, and each somehow, in spite of conflict, still reverently acceptable as an alternative interpretation of the same life.

Plain truthseekers, take comfort. If what I have told is not everything I came to know, it is still as real, as inexorable, as history. The Arizona ur-narrative, with its infrastructure of poetic irony (my mother’s illness the decisive factor in the going, my father’s warplant sickening the pivot of the return), remains still both objectively true and also how it was for us then. Pitying our mother’s pain, we understood our father’s pity for it. Pitying our father’s pain, we understood our mother’s pity for it. Through it all, to our eyes as children (and it is fair to say that the four of us, collectively, lived within these meanings, and were in fact the theater in which they were played), whatever else we saw or felt, to see the seductive sheer romance of this crisis in their young marriage and in our young and innocent lives was a real and powerful way of seeing.

Even in the East Harlem years that followed, and the life resumed in New Rochelle two or so years beyond that, we could, without laying a scratch on the impenetrable veneer of this family romance, reimagine these same facts within a plausible complexity of motives. Since we had known even as small children that our father had sold his business to go west, we could now add what he could not possibly have shared with us then: the immense significance of this to him within the framework of his values. Its meaning, that is, to a man willing to admit, as time went on, how deeply ambitious he had been for wealth, for success as defined by the materialist American dream.

And so in time I understood that it had not been the prejudice of wartime, or even the poisonous defense plant, that had sickened my father’s life, but a deep sense of failure, an underlying humiliation that could never be fully forgiven, not of my mother, not of God himself. It was difficult for us—but perhaps I should speak only for myself here, once our childhood theater of meaning had fragmented—difficult for me to grasp this view, for what could it mean to a young imagination already so powerfully fired with the symmetry of love? How could I understand the hard economic realities of wartime markets, let alone how he had experienced them—that when rationing came in, the meat futures he had sold in early 1942, just after Pearl Harbor, had skyrocketed in black market value and made other men rich? It added a jagged edge to a sad tale. It did not fundamentally alter its romantic outline, which memory had already enshrined beyond the reach of fact.

More knowledge would eventually come to write itself like the primal scene upon the innocence of Eden. And with it a clearing of vision, like a new planet swimming into view. At last we could see the madness of it, the madness of a man so deeply centered in his own life-drama that, like some vernacular Oedipus, he could inflict this near-suicidal wound upon himself, give up a burgeoning business in the East, the consolations of an extended family, renounce every former life-chance, inspire his wife to tear herself from her home, her loving sisters, from the city at the very heart of who she was, whose absence from her life could drain the splendor of Arizona of all its own magnificence and beauty. And this madness not just the frenzy of the gambler, sighting a new vein of life-chances, not just the madness of love (though the madness of love had been real, real and undying, still there between them to the last moments of their lives together), but an imbecilic rage at having given up what he really wanted, both ways, at having made a fatal mistake, at having somehow struck the wrong deal with life.

Rage. I know it now. I can hear its unmistakable roar. It is a sound like that of something happening in the street, something that comes slowly to your awakening senses with the choking smell of smoke, until you realize that it is the whole neighborhood clamoring to your benighted ears that your house is on fire.

I wondered how I had not seen it sooner, how it had happened that in all the overdetermined, multilayered authorized versions of the family story it had only been allowed a surrogate place. And yet it was there again and again, scored on each body as illness: that same self-postponement, the same surrender that leaves the deeper desire ungratified, the true invisible worm, eating her body as well as his.

Yet remember, as you read this, how it was for me then. For all these baffling signs of his rage, I too adored him, as she did. He was a force field, a powerful black hole into which one’s love might be endlessly poured. He seemed to create and consume it like God.

I adored him. He had disappeared into a train compartment, and I thought I had lost him. And for two more years, although he was there, a shadow on the well-carved Victorian porch of the Woodlawn Nursing Home, my father remained as elusive to me as an imploded star.

It was then that my mother’s family took her back into the tenement in East Harlem, she and her four sunburnt, fatherless Amerindian savages, to become Mary again, as she had always been to her sisters. And as if to do some further perverse penance, she returned to work not in dressmaking, but toiling long hours at the butcher block in Grandpa Luigi’s store, just as my father would have done.

Our squadron of aunts, wild with children and drudgery of their own, struggled to confine our afterschool mayhem to the limits of our fifth-floor walkup. It couldn’t have been easy, and they were not always pleased with an arrangement that meant they would sometimes have the lot of us on their hands when my mother was kept late at the store, but God knows they understood it. It was opera—La Bohème, Tosca; it was soap opera, all the soap operas they knew, Helen Trent, The Guiding Light, Grand Central Station. Mario, doomed to a lingering illness, swept away as by some act of God into the healing hands of the physicians at Mount Sinai, swept into the countryside of the Bronx to be cured, beautiful, dark-eyed Mario, stand-in for all the adored and evanescent men in their eternally love-besotted lives.

I ought to make an exception for my Aunt Teresa and Uncle Louie, her husband, whom she did of course adore, with an unswerving passion. But Louie, though gentle and gently spoken, was anything but an evanescent father to my four cousins, one of them so curiously a Flavia like me. His was an affection so physical you could see it turn on like a refrigerator lightbulb when he came home at night, the instant Teresa opened the flat door. And he came home, like clockwork, though sometimes he might have to pick his way through the eight of us, bivouacked on Teresa’s well-scrubbed linoleum. Still, Louie belonged to his family, not to us. He gave us the sight of what real fathering looked like—no small thing—but we remained spectators to this daily shower of affection. Teresa herself overflowed with the kind of endless, easy, big-breasted abbondanza that could not exhaust itself on eight children at a time. She tried to fill the gap, to be mother-surrogate for the sister she loved and pitied, but she could not be father too.

Our own apartment was, as I have said, at the top of the house, right under the roof, convenient to laundry-hanging and tar-beach summer afternoons. To compensate for the climb, my mother would congratulate us regularly for having “nobody walking on our heads.” Once we were allowed to be on our own after school for a few hours at a time, we got to know the unmistakable sound of her swift, eager steps up that last flight. It was a wonderful, terrible sound: wonderful, because she was the lodestar of our lives; terrible, because her expectations of us were high, and her accountings stern.

It was as though as the second daughter she had received at least the second most sizable dollop of whatever made Sicilian women serious women—donne serie. May had the most, then Mary, Teresa next, Mildred after Teresa, and so on, as if the serious juice had run lower and lower as each girl had come up the line.

As the war came to a close and the post-war began and the younger sisters were marrying themselves off, this gradation grew more and more obvious, and the family house at 230 came to seem more and more a kind of allegory, with the stories set out floor by floor like something out of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Just below us on the fourth floor, side by side with Teresa, were Aunt May and her Dante—she the eldest daughter, he the well-combed, finely hatted shadow on the stairs. I have said that no one seemed to know how he made his living, or if he made a living and wasn’t simply sponging off May’s crucifying beadwork. But May was dour, silent, and uncomplaining. They had two little girls named Libby and Adele, prim and pale, who never seemed to play with other children, let alone with us, and whose trademark sound was the tap-tap of their patent leather shoes as they came and went from their apartment hand in hand with May, or with both May and Dante on Sundays.

Now and then we might hear May’s ringing voice through the floor, like a muffled bell, raised to someone in rebuke. Was it him? Otherwise, a reclusive and hostile family silence, appropriate to a very serious woman, and the vision of her, perhaps once a week from June through September, leaning out over the fire escape off the apartment kitchen just beneath ours, silently drying her long, full, silvering hair in the slant rays of the afternoon sun.

But two more stories down, a single flight up from the street, lived Aunt Bea and her dandified husband Sonny with a big, white-toothed smile and the sweetest sweet-talk in New York. Bea was daughter number five. She had been baptized Rosina, and, following the lead of her older sister Mildred, had had the name surgically removed, like a mole. But just as a name, “Bea”—or as they sometimes called her, “Bee-bee”—fit her, like a new nylon stocking with a plumbline seam. She was a honeymaker with a sting, or an existential declaration of presentness. She could have been a piece of steel shot. She had those perky, supergroomed looks that were the epitome of prettiness in wartime women. “Which of us is the prettiest?” she asked dumb little me one night, after I’d followed her and her three younger sisters, Anna, Joan, and Elena, into the galley kitchen and sat gazing in stupefied enchantment as they schmoozed and smoked over coffee after work. She knew I’d say she was, and then she’d smirk and toss her head as I blushed at being euchred into her little scheme.

But I loved to hear her boast. “Daawrhling,” she’d say, addressing all her sisters in the singular (and in a drawl that was classic highfalutin NooYawk), “my Sonny was baawrhn to dance.” This would be followed by a comparison of herself to Ginger Rogers on the dance floor, while Elena, the youngest, laughed her big ringing, cynical, make-me-believe-it laugh, and Joan, eyes faintly sidelong and voice tinged with annoyance, would comment that (with her round face and bottle-exaggerated blondness) it was she people said looked like Ginger Rogers, and Bea would have no trouble granting her that. “But I’ve got my Fred Astaaayah,” she’d remind her, meaning Sonny, her dancing fool of a husband. And then she would raise those perfectly plucked black eyebrows above those perfectly curled black eyelashes, fire up a Chesterfield, toss the match deftly into the sink, adjust her snooded aureole of black hair with her free hand, blow two plumes of smoke through her nostrils, and turn her smile beatifically on me.

But that was until Sonny gambled or otherwise squandered away every hard-earned dollar she made on Seventh Avenue faster than she could have had it printed, plus who knows what else he’d done that she wouldn’t talk about. So she simply upped one fine Sunday morning (as we children, drawn by the garbled sound of quarreling, watched awestruck from the top of the stairwell), emerging from her apartment in a dramatically floating, beige satin peignoir, and cried out in that wonderful Spagnola contralto made more lush by good cognac and cigarettes that he was a sonuvabitch bastard! Nobody could shout the word bastard like my Aunt Bee-bee—BA-A-STA-A-RRD—as well-ventilated as Gramercy Park. Then she threw him out and all his bow ties down the stairs after him.

Aunt Anna, next down from Bea and also next to get married, lived with Joan and Elena (what a ménage, when you think about it) across the hall from Bea and Sonny, sharing the second-floor apartment where I had seen and will never forget seeing my grandfather dead. The parlor he’d been waked in had been closed off for more than three years now, until they decided to brave superstition and open it up for the wedding, redoing it with fancy draperies as a honeymoon suite.

But the honeymoon ended rapidly, as perhaps under those auspices was only likely. Richard, her husband, was a ruddily pink and attractive Irishman. Otherwise he was unremarkable and ambition-free, as well as who knows how spooked by the strange mores of these Spagnola women. In the end, he seemed to prefer spending his nights out on Third Avenue to coming home to his neurotic little wife and (eventually) their amazingly pale and poorly baby boy, also named Richard, who was always caterwauling with earache. Or he came home only by the time poor sad little Anna, glum and long-suffering, had long been in bed, eating her heart out. Anna, more passive-aggressive than Bea, finally obliged herself one day by having a nervous breakdown. By the time she was back from the hospital, under heavy sedation, Richard was gone.

Uncle Joey may have had something to do with this.

Seriousness was perhaps not the same kind of issue with the two Spagnola men as with the women, though it was not much of a sampling to go by. Joey was the younger of the two Spagnola brothers, the only one to come to live at 230 after he married, taking an apartment on the third floor, the one under May and over Bea. That was after V-J Day in August of 1945 and all the homecoming fuss that followed the end of the war, when he got back from the Navy. What a block party! What nights and nights of block parties! You could hear the music all over the city, way into the night. The one on our street made us kids mad with envy as we watched from our fifth-floor perch, wishing we could have been just a few years more grown up.

The stories about Joey, from wildest motorcycle days to audacious exploits in the Navy, would curl porcupine quills. He was renowned for having crashed into an El pillar on East 116th Street when he was eighteen and lived to tell about it. Just the sort of story, when the family was gathered around the table and the wine was low, to make someone sigh, “Aaaah, I could write a book,” at which everybody else would nod as if autobiography were the family business. But Joey had finally settled down with his beloved Concetta to wife, found a union construction job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, then got his own plumbing license and worked independently on the side. Hardcore down-and-dirty, he could fix anything—exactly the kind of “real man” Spagnola women seemed destined never to get in a husband.

Concetta, who called herself Mary in still another case of Italian-girl cosmetic name-surgery, was a very pretty woman—Uncle Joe would have tolerated nothing less—with the deepest, most soulful, big Kewpie-doll brown eyes I ever saw. Not even my mother’s were set in such lush penumbras of soft purple. So intensely mortal were they, even tragic, they seemed to draw all attention from the small, perfect nose and little Cupid-bow mouth. And yet all these features were bound together with a flint will and uncompromising intelligence. Joey, you could tell, had been tried and toughened in the crucible of eight sisters, at least six of them smart.

Once settled into married life, Joey began little by little to define for himself a semiserious role as paterfamilias to this vertical community of women. Even had he still harbored old Sicilian standards of female virtue, which is doubtful, he knew there was no saving the sum of it his sisters had already thrown away marrying jerks. But he could protect the few still-remaining rags of family honor by making sure Joan and Elena were properly bought and paid for by decent, respectable guys before anybody took them to bed. And he could try, as best he could, to settle disputes across the halls and up and down the stairs.

I used to think it strange that Uncle Tony, who should have worn this mantle, didn’t. Besides being number one of the ten, you’d have thought he had just the peaceable temperament for it, more so than Joey, who had always been the one with the short fuse. And yet here was Joey—the maverick, the trickster, the risk-taker, the guy who broke the rules and pushed the boundaries and fell on his face and picked himself up with a raunchy joke—taking charge. Joey, with the vaguely unsavory reputation as a hustler, a fixer, somebody who could always get it for you wholesale. You’d think he lacked the moral authority to boss all those bossy women.

And yet maybe that was why he could. The odd thing is that his big-talking, self-inventing sisters could never have admitted to themselves that for all the piety about their darling Papa and the lip service they paid to Duty as defined by the patriarchal culture they’d been steeped in, they had actually been liberated by their father’s death and by their coming-of-age into a wartime, Eleanor Roosevelt culture, where women were being chancily slipped a license for independence. And because he somehow understood this and they weren’t ready to, he still got that begrudgery of respect when he pulled rank. They would have made mincemeat of a big innocent, fair-eyed lummox of a guy like Uncle Tony. Maybe they already had, before I was there to see it.

Uncle Tony reminded me of an unfunny Popeye, tough and gentle. Family folklore had it that he’d been a forceps delivery, which accounted for his being a bit slow and a bit deaf, and maybe for a comedically challenged sort of crusty solemnity somebody I knew later used to refer to as a damaged laughing-string. You could not have dealt with Bea and Anna and Joan and Elena without an intact, catgut, cable-strength laughing-string.

But Tony was not stupid, and maybe actually had the whole thing figured out, having married a comfortable widow somewhat older than himself, an Irishwoman named Helen with two grown children, who was perfectly happy to stop right there. They had taken her apartment several blocks away, and once Joey moved in at 230, they divvied up the work. Tony took the job of keeping the old family building under repair and collecting the rents. He tried to make his job look hard, and muttered about it a lot, buffed the brass on the front-door hardware till you could see yourself in it, and kept the stoop and areaway so swept no bum scrounging around in it could have turned up a single used cigarette butt. An ice cream kid-finger-smudge never lasted on the big glass doors for more than half an hour. But nobody would ever doubt who got the better deal.

Through all the three years we were there and beyond, 230 remained the spiffiest and most beautiful building on the block. Uncle Tony saw that the stairwells were washed and the cornices painted, and the boiler always in tiptop repair, so that even the nonfamily tenants on the top floor wouldn’t have to bang the pipes for heat. He made sure all the bolts on the window grilles were secure so nobody could blame him if their dumb kid fell out and got spiked on the areaway railing, sixty feet down. The tradeoff was beyond the workday: no kids under foot, no catfights, no getting caught in the middle.

But, as for me, I think Tony lost out, missing pastacicede in the kitchen with the girls, or sitting out in the parlor around the radio, glued to the Hit Parade and singing “Mairzy Doats” at the tops of our voices.

And because they weren’t his windows, he never got to lean out of them, as we did, grilles or no, to get all the news of the war—or the peace, when the peace finally came—all the news you’d ever want to hear, straight up from the street. Never got to watch as the tall sculpted image of Our Lady of Mount Carmel floated drunkenly below on a sea of worshippers every sixteenth of July, her cone-shaped body covered with fluttering gray-green dollar bills, like a woman-tree made out of pure money.