Читать книгу Under the Rose - Flavia Alaya - Страница 16
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The death of FDR had been announced in ten-foot-high letters on the street pavement beneath our tenement windows, letters meticulously painted by neighborhood boys, in a deep, reverential silence. The shock itself was stunning, and the convergence of the sudden passing of this larger-than-life being (and the only president I had ever known) with the end of the European war barely weeks later, as if he had died for it, burnished his image into temporary sainthood. Yet all of it, all of the imagery of the fatherly leader with the deeply ringed eyes, all the relentless movie iconography of patriotic sacrifice and the endless trumpeting of war bonds and victory gardens and the soothing caramel harmonies of the Andrews Sisters at the USO—all the bittersweet stuff our lives till then had been drenched in—was utterly burnt off by what we came to see within the span of that same year, as spring became summer, as summer fall, in Life and Look and Associated Press newsphotos and Pathé newsreels, that the war had ended twice in unspeakable carnage, once of the tortured and murdered Jews and again of the scorched, annihilated victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even children saw this, saw it in the plainest and most brutal clarity, saw humanity exposed in so extreme, so unimaginable an uncomprehending innocence of suffering that we could never wake up from the sight of it again.
So in a true sense I was a different child on either side of my tenth birthday, a week after V-E Day. Till then, and perhaps for the briefest time after, I might still gather the world’s moment to me as if it were my own, still rejoice in what seemed to me a bright entry into personhood, melding the end of the terrible war with my own little coming-of-age.
My mother gave me the rapturous gift of permission to see Victor Mature in One Million B.C. at the Cosmo on the other side of Third Avenue. I doubt she was ever sold on my father’s stern principles in this matter of the movies, and with him away there seems never to have been a question of us going, beyond worrying about the cost of it. Ann would come, and my brothers, of course—they had to—and as for me, always the willing pachyderm at the bottom of the pile, sharing it was the best part of the gift. She couldn’t go, sadly, not with just a single afternoon off to clean house and make pineapple-upside-down cake, but I knew when we got back she’d make sure a bit of the pleasure of it rubbed off.
The primary meaning of the movies, ever since our Dumbo days, had been bonding. There’d been that curious, wonderful night back in Tucson when my father had actually taken us to see Mr. Skeffington—a night I remember both because it was a night and because it was such an unexampled fatherly indulgence. Of course, it had to be a dour morality play—a Bette Davis classic about a vain and selfish wife who contracts diphtheria and loses all her beautiful hair, which I understood even then to be her punishment. But I will never forget the anguish of watching that single false curl drop silently to the carpet, my mother quietly snuffling into her handkerchief beside me as I sobbed my pitying tears into the soft, red-fox collar of her best winter coat.
My birthday movie was another story, One Million B.C. being perhaps the nearest thing Hollywood had come to a skin-flick since the Code. Even the Cosmo theater thought no one under sixteen should see so much flesh draped in such scanty primordial outerwear without an accompanying adult. Somehow we hadn’t known this—certainly my mother hadn’t—and we got as far as the queue before we panicked at the thought of being turned away at the window.
Lou is not quite fifteen and small for his age. Behind us stands a gray-haired woman in a navy-blue jacket and hat. “Would you say we’re with you, lady?” he asks. Widening her dull-blue eyes, “All four o’ yez?” she mouths back, and bounces her head four times, down the string of us. But she smiles, she twinkles, she actually seems pleased to have acquired a family. And she points out that she will have to get ahead of us in line.
Her lie relieved me to the soul. And it occurs to me now that whatever subliminal weakening of our moral fiber took place that afternoon must have taken place at that moment. Otherwise it would have to have been produced by the absolutely bewitching sight of flowing lava over a beautiful, desolate landscape that put me in mind of the Southwest, and probably was. Which is all I can bring back, except for Victor Mature himself, and the distinct, if fleeting thought that he was a much less handsome version of my absent father.
Lou was going to be headed off to Cardinal Hayes High School on scholarship that fall, and as Catholic went I wouldn’t have been surprised if he told me that they’d debated the ethics of our movie matinee in his moral theology class—who, precisely, had committed the sin, what sin it was, if it was mortal or venial, and whether the little blue lady would go to hell if she were Catholic and didn’t confess it, or go to hell because she wasn’t Catholic no matter whether she confessed it or not.
Sometimes I could just not figure out the things priests and nuns typically got worked up over, like how much skin you exposed in your confirmation dress, or whether you wore a proper scarf to church instead of the make-do little handkerchief with a bobbypin, or brought in your little donation envelope for the basket on Sundays or went to the 9 A.M. mass to get properly sermonized by the pastor. I wish I’d known that scriptural saying about the gnats and elephants, since with all that was going on in the world I thought they seemed to be digesting a bellyful of elephant as if it were cherry Jell-O.
All I knew was that before I started the fifth grade at Our Lady Queen of Angels on East 113th Street, I’d had four years of school, two public sandwiched between two parochial, and public was way out front in the standings. On my first day at St. Gabriel’s when I was five, the nun-principal had struck such terror into my little body that I’d peed, hot and wet, right into the cane chair in her office, and it was as if I’d spent the whole year after that expecting the imminent loss of bladder control. Whereas I had loved my little two-room public schoolhouse teachers in the desert, especially the one—hardy and plain, tanned as leather—who taught third grade in the adobe school we were yellow-bused to at the edge of the Hopi reservation. She had never been bound to rules for their own sake. She had even worn jeans to school sometimes. And we’d worked hard—hard work being far from just a Catholic school discipline, though you’d have thought it was from the way people carried on about the difference. I loved to work—what else did you do, after all, if you were the fat, smart, artsy girl who was always in love with somebody, but nobody was ever in love with? The teacher was always asking me to draw something on the construction-paper covers of her string-tied little manuals. When she saw I could also read and count beyond my age and class, she’d put me to tutoring other kids, a bonus for me, who could see from age eight that teaching was also a better way of learning.
Then there was a month or two of fourth grade with Sister Agnes at Saints Peter and Paul in Tucson, that brief spell just before we came back east. Sensitive as I was to names, I didn’t think hers beautiful enough for her. Her beauty astonished me, the young face smooth and smiling between the tight, snow-white bands, great, carved brown eyes dancing as she proudly watched me produce a perfect cylinder of Palmer Os, in one big looping curl like a Slinky, out of a single dip of a fine-nibbed pen in the inkwell.
Our Lady Queen of Angels, enclave of Franciscan friars in brown cloaks and rope belts and of a teaching order of the Sisters of Mercy, was sheer Lowood by comparison. In fact, reading Jane Eyre as a teenager, I had the advantage of a perfect reference point for the misery both of Jane and of Helen Burns, because, while I suffered myself, it was much less than my poor sister Ann, who had always needed gentleness more than I did and took any rebuke as a hurt to heart and soul. And ironically it was also her misery that in the end released me. Plagued with colds and earaches and terrible bouts of tonsillitis almost from the moment we were back in New York, she’d been laid up at home again and again all winter, and I had become her runner, fetching assignments home from school and carrying her finished homework back to Sister Agrippina.
Agrippina! If only I’d known the atrocity embedded in the history of that name, it might at least have given me a perspective on her sadism—for what else could have possessed her to invoke the mother of Caligula as she took the veil? One afternoon as I stood in front of her second-grade class with the news that my sister was sick again, she reached into Ann’s desk for all her notebooks and threw them across the room, spilling their pages onto the floor at my feet. Then she made me get down and collect them again. I wept, humiliated, furious, both in front of the snickering children and all the way home, remembering her big voice roaring, “Sick! Sick! Your sister is out sick every time the wind blows!”
It didn’t occur to me then how much Ann’s illness might actually have been a counteroffensive in a kind of war, her only weapon against Sister Agrippina’s relentless mental and even physical bullying. I knew only that Sister Agrippina was a tyrant, that my little sister was sick, and that it was mean and unjust for her to be accused of malingering.
My mother, whose outrage could be as swift, clean, and incisive as the blow of a cleaver on the neck of a frying chicken, could hardly wait for dawn to march over to the school and deliver what was known in the stairwell at 230 as “a piece of her mind.” Sister Agrippina, believe me, was never going to be caught harming a single brown curl of little Ann’s head or speaking to her in a voice above a murmur. But in an exquisitely twisted gesture of retribution, I was the one my mother pulled out. I can just hear her saying it—“Smartest girl in the fifth grade, maybe in the whole school, you don’t even know what you’ve got”—as she sent me vindictively over to those godless public-school Protestants at PS 102. Let those Calabresi, those capotosti hard-boiled-egg-headed bully Franciscans eat that one!
Someday, oh, someday, Mother Church was going to get her sweet revenge in the shape of my own mind-numbing seizures of a religious passion, but I would never again set foot as a student inside a parochial school. Had I been able to foresee the finality of the break at the time, it would have been fine with me. I regretted only that Ann, whom I wanted so desperately to protect from all harm, had to stay behind me at the Angels, and that, now, not only was I scarily alone, but so was she.
From my mother’s point of view, I suppose, Ann was still her baby, too small to make the trip she could let me take, overriding her other fears, to this farther-away school across Second Avenue and down three blocks to 111th Street. Or maybe it was some superstitious dread, some deference to the power of the Franciscans and what they might do if they got really mad enough at you. Or even a simple compromise, arrived at with my father on a Sunday visit to Woodlawn. She took such problems to him, I know, and pondered his advice, if he gave advice, or followed his orders, if he gave orders.
But personally she held no special quarter for Catholic schools, unable to stomach the child-bullying and all the endless, drumming, hectoring indoctrination. Most of all she hated the whining pleas for money. “Non finiscono mai,” she’d grumble. “They never stop. It’s a racket, like everything else.” And yet she was a devout Catholic, in her way, prayerful to the bone, and a good Catholic mother who wanted us—especially us girls—to have our white-dress first communions and confirmations and look for all the world like good little Catholic girls.
She herself had been educated to the sixth grade in public schools. She had thought school wonderful, and had longed to stay and go on for her diploma. It was the dream she would confess to us those nights when she was not too tired to talk, sitting at the side of our beds in that little train compartment of a room with the eerie green picture of St. Ann and the Virgin on the wall.
Smoothing her work-roughened hands with lotion as she spoke, working the cream into her fingertips, she would take our soft, small hands between hers one at a time and pretend to polish them, telling us about her life, about her dream of someday becoming a teacher. Then she would unroll her thick dark hair, beginning now to have the odd streak of gray in it, from the stiff net cylinder that held it in a smooth corona at the back of her head, and let it fall wavily down, and brush it and then braid it slowly and deftly for bed.
But Grandma Flavia, she said, had told her it was just too bad, there was a family to feed, and sixth grade was as long as she could wait to send her daughters to work. So Mary had had to go to work, and then to turn over her paycheck every week, untouched, and make a good case for getting any of it back over carfare. You could tell she was never going to let any such holding back happen to us. And every last bit we could get out of school, from the book report on the presidents to the topographical maps of Brazil with the little cotton balls on them, was to be got for her as well as for ourselves.
She was such a strange medley, fear and softness in her dark eyes, daring in her hands! We’d beg her to repeat the little story about the job she’d got when she was twenty, after the interviewer had said she’d write and she had snapped back that “she was looking for a job, not a correspondence.” How we loved the boldness of it! And yet now she seemed to have been born to worry, as if her secret sense of the world’s danger had been touched too many times since her father’s near brush with the bullet. As if the blow of my father’s illness, the intuition that it was meant as a reproach for some wrong she had done, had permanently darkened a part of her heart, overlaid some wellspring of natural joy in her with a stern, legislated anxiety. When she took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes and then looked up again, you could just catch that look, that tremulous look, flickering between courage and fear.
She worried about us, about Carlo especially, and the spite that lay like a thin glass wall of faked bravado on his childish heart. How would he survive? How would all her overachieving little brood make it through this flinty world, which seemed to grow more unbearably flinty and cruel every day? She had created a shrine of her own on the highboy in her room. She would light candles and get down on her knees before the blessed blue Virgin, or with eyes squeezed passionately shut murmur earnest prayers to Saint Anthony, he of the bare-chested and be-aureoled baby Jesus on one arm and pure shaft of lily on the other, the only true male mother of the canon. As soon as devotion to the Infant Jesus of Prague spread after the war, she purchased her own little statuette and gave away several to her sisters, lighting candles to him, too, buying all the protection she could get. Our innocent prayers were credit in the bank. On Sunday nights we were brought to our own knees to murmur the rosary together. I was hypnotized by the humming sound, the sensation of the smooth pearly beads slipping between my fingers, the sense that we were braiding our prayers as surely as if they had been the warm strands of my sister’s recalcitrant brown hair.
We prayed for my father, but for ourselves as well, body and soul, since for her there was no telling them apart. I think she may have prayed for me in a special way, seeing me headstrong (“like your father”) and out in the world on such a long lead. She sewed garlic cloves into my underwear. She placed a scapular around my neck and under my sweater before she sent me off to school in the morning, crossing herself at the window as I took the turn into Second Avenue and disappeared around the corner.
•
My father, she would say (she seemed never to tire of saying, with a sigh, like a hope continuously deferred, even though it might be true), was getting well. Every time she visited him without us she would bring our latest prizes with her, our gold-starred reports on the heavenly constellations, our little drawings and poems, and come back and tell us how proud he was, and how much stronger he looked. When we saw him ourselves, those spring Sundays among the apple blossoms and tulip trees up at Woodlawn, alongside the cemetery stones, he still looked limp and thin and alien, not quite ready to face us, let alone the world, but his face was growing fuller, his eyes brighter and steadier, and the tide of color seemed to be rising. Surely he felt the daunting strangeness of our having done so much growing up without him.
He had begun to write. It was something he did well and gracefully, like drawing, and had always done, but dismissively—as if it were a road not taken once and now revisited with pain. We saw none of it, except for a quip that appeared in the nursing-home newsletter. I wonder he even told us of it, it was so slight and silly: “Mario to Vinnie: ‘I lost a fortune overnight.’ Vinnie: ‘How’d you do that?’ Mario: ‘I went to bed feeling like a million dollars and woke up feeling like two cents.’” I was a child. It made me laugh. Now I think it may have been for him something like that little sliver of an olive branch in the beak of Noah’s trial bird after the flood. The Old Nick, the devil of the Neapolitan in him, was still there, that dry, faintly bitter and cynical humor that had once made him feel alive.
And it had a subtext, after all, didn’t it. For the loss of a million dollars overnight might be sharper than a serpent’s tooth. But there was such a thing, perhaps, as taking the venom in jesting, homeopathic doses.
It must have been that same spring of 1946 that I cracked my lip in Van Cortlandt Park, on a rare Sunday outing, a splendid day suddenly turned catastrophic. My own stupid fault. My mother couldn’t stop me. “Headstrong—just like your father,” she wept, exasperated. In this case the word headstrong applied literally, my head having led my body where my body had thought better of following. I had not lost my mimetic impulse for doing just what my brothers did, and after lunch they’d decided to take a walk along the top of a wood rail fence. But with their lean and boyishly arranged bodies they could almost float, like acrobats on a wire, balancing with a wave of their arms. I was rounder, full of wobbles, no plumper than I had ever been, but the weight was beginning to move downward onto my hips. As I felt myself fall I must have drawn my mouth in over my teeth. My chin struck the fence post just as my feet landed, driving my upper incisor straight through the soft, yielding mass of my upper lip.
“You’re lucky you got no worse,” said the doctor at the first aid station as he put in the stitches. My chin was sore, but amazingly the tooth had not broken. My mother held me by the arms, her eyes damp, her wet, blood-slimed handkerchief still wadded in her hand. My brothers and little sister stood by feeling sorry for me, Ann’s big and anxious eyes only a little less tearful than my own.
“Will she be . . . disfigured, doctor?” my mother asked, probably wondering even as she said it if I knew what “disfigured” meant. I knew. It marked a leap in my consciousness to think what it might mean to me now. He said, “Not if she can keep these stitches in long enough to close the wound.” But the lip is a tender place. He couldn’t make the stitches very close or very tight. And how, I thought, as the days went by, if you have to eat and drink and smile and brush your teeth, can you possibly keep stitches in your upper lip from coming loose? I worried about this. A babysitter, once, had told me my mouth was already too big.
But the little threads tickled my tongue and slowly unraveled on their own. I didn’t even have to go back to have them removed. Little by little, the tender puffiness of my lip receded into a slightly off-center little pad of fullness. Looking in the mirror, more and more as girls did, I could never bring myself to love it, though in time I found it might be lovely in a certain light, and especially tender to a kiss.
I cannot remember my father’s coming home. Strange, when everything about his being home again is so vivid. He seemed to slip imperceptibly back into our lives as if the space he’d left had never been allowed to close. I don’t remember even being glad, although I must have been. There was something secret and yet convulsive about the change he wrought in our lives—about the change he wrought in me. I felt him as a newfound love, of whom I thought present or absent, toward whom I was abject in my tenderness. But I also felt him as a new and phallic presence, a vigilant gaze, which seemed to be trained on me to a degree both lovely and unbearable. I can remember his holding up my chin to examine my still-puffy mouth wound, looking at it sad-eyed, and making that familiar old, heart-sinking tsk-tsk sound of his between his tongue and his teeth. I had almost forgotten that sound and the ache it gave my heart.
I can remember awakening rather abruptly to a sense that even in your own familiar house there could be a new and unprecedented division of space, here, in your own doorless railroad flat where everything lay open to the world and where, apart from the bathroom, privacy was mythical. And yet on a hot day that summer, as I scurried from bathroom to bedroom in my underwear, I felt his eyes on me, and that dark, desiring, yet hurtful look of his, that tsk-tsk of disapproval, followed by that even more stinging shame of a reproach directed not at me but at my mother, as if I were no longer his child, as if I were a stranger. And perhaps I was—perhaps we were both strangers to each other.
Mario resumed his place working at the side of his father, Luigi, in the pork store on Third Avenue.
How little I have said of Grandpa Luigi, for all that he was our benefactor through those troubled East Harlem years. And yet he was the only grandparent I knew past my earliest childhood memories of my mother’s father. Of course, the time we spent with him outside the store was small, our four steep flights too much to ask of his poor old legs. And as for Sundays, what would they have been like for my mother without Mario, surrounded by all the Neapolitan in-laws who only pretended to love her?
I can imagine her ansia about this, nevertheless. And I know while she worked with Grandpa she often invited him home, and that we loved his visits—the good, genial, round, unassuming old man whose wheezing chest we could hear long before his beamish face appeared above the last flight of stairs. Chubby and chapfallen, he seemed a wonder of the world to me. His teeth were gone and he had refused to replace them with dentures. He chewed his food with his hardened gums and laughed bigly out of that amazingly toothless mouth. I marveled at his life, which seemed to me simple as a monk’s, and at his depths of salty good humor for dealing with the malign fate of war that had kept him stranded in the United States until it was over, unable to get back. For his children had made family lives here. He was alone.
He knew no English, or little. Relying on my mother at the shop had not improved it. But he had memorized a rollicking dictionary of affectionate Italian body language for kids, and could sit my sister and me on on his knees and sing us Neapolitan rhymes, and let out that big, heaving laugh that shook his empty chaps, and leave us squealing and giggling with a stinging rub of his day’s growth of grizzled beard on our tender cheeks.
He could not have been more different from my father, whose superbia came straight from Nonna Immacolata—or so I imagined from the unsmiling pictures I had seen of her—she who had declared back in 1929 that she would not celebrate her son’s wedding to a lowly, swart-skinned Zeechilyaahn, and vigorously denounced any member of the family who did. I’m not sure how I came to know this of her. Perhaps it had been one of my mother’s lonely confidences, those nights when she had turned over the darkest earth in her heart’s garden. I can imagine her being sorry she had told us, as if it had been a betrayal of him, one of those memories to lay away in the mortuary of denial, perhaps to be opened when we were grown, perhaps never ever to be opened at all. But, once told, how could it be untold? And now it strikes such a solemn chord in me that it is difficult to recover even what I must have felt in pity for my father and grandfather when those soft, black-bordered letters arrived from Sperone saying that Nonna Immacolata had died.
It had been almost ten years since Luigi had seen her. I am tempted to wonder just how deeply he felt the loss—surely less than my father, whose grief I expected to be what it was, horribly dark and solemn. And yet having only such a standard, or the remembered melodrama of my Spagnola aunts to measure my grandfather’s sorrow by, how could I tell? He sorrowed. Perhaps he was mortified that he had missed her passing. He seemed to long for home more than ever. He seemed to be thinking more than ever of his own mortality. Satisfied, now, that he had seen my father through his transition, he signed over the lease to the store, and we took him to the steamship pier and waved him off.
And now from across the sea poured more letters than ever, a whole new transatlantic revival of famiglia, soft, sepia photographs wrapped in their fine, almost diaphanous airmail paper—who had died, who’d been born, who’d survived, who’d grown up, who’d suffered, married, miscarried. Brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins, second cousins twice removed, with names that reclaimed all the territory of naming abandoned by my American aunts—Rosina, Raffaelo, Michelina, Irena, Rosetta, Clementina, Filiberto, Alfonso, Cenzina. New letters came from Grandpa Luigi, fired up to merchant again, eager to get into the booming postwar export trade. The iron is hot, Mario is well, no? Now he should come home. Home, they said. And he had been in America since 1921!
He promises my mother a brief visit only, a month or two, till Thanksgiving, Christmas at the latest. But it doesn’t seem possible to me. My father has just come back into my life, how can he be leaving? Until it is real I refuse to accept it, until we go to that same pier again on that gray September morning and I actually see him, slumped among the massed bodies along the deck rail, searching for us in the roaring, weeping crowd on the pier, tipping his dark fedora as the S.S. Vulcania disappears into the mist. I could have drowned in the aching sound the ship bellowed as it pulled away. They found me hunched in a corner of the girls’ bathroom at school later that day, sobbing inconsolably.
What I haven’t said is that he had taken my brother Carlo with him. Because I couldn’t bear it. Carlo, still undersized and baby-faced at fourteen, with a devilish shock of brown hair that got into his eyes, eyes that otherwise crackled with mischief. He had not wanted to go. Why should he? I loved Italy. It should have been me.
Yet it wasn’t, and I knew why. Not just because it would have been awkward, difficult, absurd, but because in the twisted moral vocabulary of the Italian family, this was not a gift, not a reward, but a punishment. Not that they would have admitted it. No, no, no. It was protection. It was to take him out of danger, remove him from the war zone of our East Harlem neighborhood. And they were right. It was no longer just another ghetto of tough-guy Italians but the epicenter of radical ethnic change. Always a feisty neighborhood, contested turf for southern paesani of every dialect, for years the working-class politics of a brilliant labor congressman named Vito Marcantonio had mellowed the strife and even forged a peace between Italians and the blacks in Harlem proper, along the great Park Avenue divide. But great new migrations of southern blacks and Puerto Ricans had been thrown into the mix by the end of the war. Violent playground riots made my brothers’ Benjamin Franklin School infamous. There were ugly turf-war clashes on the side streets, terrifying sidewalk confrontations. A boy could turn a street corner and find himself face-to-face with a switchblade. This had actually happened to Carlo. My parents truly feared for his life. He was tinder to a match, let alone a blowtorch.
And yet he had seemed to become so much more tractable while my father was gone, only to flare up and be restive and difficult again as soon as he was home. I am sure my mother saw this and felt helpless, just as my father saw it and felt affronted, defied. But where could they go for help? Not to professionals—this would be vergogna, disgrace—yet my father refused to be helpless. He was resolved. It didn’t matter if Carlo were set back a term at school, or how a boy so high-spirited might feel, trapped in a strange culture under his father’s constant surveillance, or he overruled such thoughts as womanish. He knew what was right for his son. And he meant well—he did—he meant to take an absentee father’s full if belated responsibility. And he would teach him, finally—teach him as only he could—the lessons that must come from the great book of travel and of life.
I wrote to my brother almost the moment he left. Of course I could not see him there; I could see only myself in his place. “It must make you giddy,” I said, thinking how excited I would be. And he shot back, as soon as he could put pencil to paper: “I am not ‘giddy,’ you dumbbell. Don’t tell me how I’m supposed to feel.”
The months passed swiftly after all, and the two of them came back not much later than promised, soon after the New Year. My father looked as if he had been home. He had finally stopped smoking and put on more weight. My brother looked worse, more scowling, more passive and victimized.
Grateful as I was to see my father again, I still wanted my Italy out of this, and hungered selfishly for its secret. I scanned everything they brought back with them, stood expectantly at the lip of each trunk, leaden with the weight of deeply embroidered linens and great lengths of Italian silk, watched the raising of every treasure as if it had come up out of the sunken Titanic and had some great revelation trapped in its folds. And they were treasures, gorgeous to the eye, silken to the hand. Yet even in my hunger I could sense something vaguely repellent beneath the aura of magic in those beautiful objects, as if I knew too well from the world of my mother and my aunts—most of them half-blind from close sewing and beading—what it meant to do elaborate, fine ricamo on a tablecloth twelve feet long. And so, instead of Italian hillsides abloom with oranges and light, I found myself perversely imagining aunts and cousins, girls like me, straining their eyes against the fading winter daylight to finish these lenzuoli and serviette in time, so that Mario could take them back with him and make everyone rich.
My father had bought a camera just before he’d left for Italy, this time for making eight-millimeter movies. That old itch, the photographic passion that is as much a part of him as his eyes—and it must always be the best, the latest, the technological cutting edge, like the magical timer he used to set at our picnics at Indian Lake and Sabino Canyon, so that he himself could be in the snapshots with us. He had dredged up all his old and beautiful still equipment before the trip and spread it restlessly on the table, hungering for something new. And now, one day, soon after he is back, he picks me up after school and takes me with him to the offices of Bell & Howell to buy his first projector. He converses with men who wear ties, yet roll up their shirtsleeves to their elbows like butchers; he laughs and talks shop with them as if they are his comrades. At home again, he takes out the reels he has filmed abroad and sets them up and we turn down the lights and run the silent flickering images late into the night.
He calls these places by familiar names—Sperone, Striano, Napoli—but they are like no Italy I have ever imagined. And they are all alike, all alike mean, war-devastated places the winter rains have left sodden and muddy. My impatient cousins pass in obligatory procession before the camera’s patronizing stare, their mouths moving in soundless messages. The camera starts into a rough courtyard where the same cousins are chasing a huge, thrashing sow maddened with fear in a seasonal ritual of slaughter. They seize her and bring her screaming to the knife. She is screaming but you cannot hear her. And then the film stops and starts again, and she is hanging from a post, her blood is dripping into a pail, and we cry out.
My sister and I cry out. Carlo is silent, and I look for his eyes, near me in the darkened, flickering room, but he seems unmoved. How is this possible? What enemy of all the beauty I remembered had he met and conquered there, to be so still, so complacent? Where had it gone? What had he seen that I couldn’t see, what meaning of this hideous mystery of war and after-war that I couldn’t understand? He suddenly seems smaller, smaller even than he had seemed dancing there in the courtyard and flicking his handsome, wicked little face across the screen, here, now, gripping the armrests of his chair, staring arrogantly away.
Movies, suddenly, became threaded with our lives now as if they had never been forbidden. My father, the same father who had barely let them across the threshold once, threw open the door and invited them straight into the house. The metaphor is exact. First he turned the movie camera on us and made it the passion still photography had been a decade before. It seems almost too disparaging to call this premeditated orchestration of images “home movies.” They were veritable cinema verité, his way of putting “home” at an aesthetic and emotional distance and re-creating it as art.
My mother humored him in this steel whim, satisfied merely that he was alive and well and back in her bed at night. She humored him even when he determined one day that he would sink even deeper into the belly of the beast, that he would beat the Hollywood film racket he had despised by joining it. He had by this time established a rather fawning friendship with the pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on East 116th Street—perhaps pressed on by my mother, whose sense of the debt she owed the Madonna del Carmine for the response to her novenas could be a force. This friendship flowered, eventually, into a scheme to get parishioners to church and to the movies at the same time, movies vetted by the pastor as well as approved by the Code.
It became an East Harlem Cinema Paradiso, my father in the equivalent of the choir-loft projection room. Movies could be rented at a special sixteen-millimeter rate, and the church, to help recoup the expenses, would apply a small admission charge for stepping down to the basement entrance of a Sunday evening. Perhaps my father received a fee, perhaps not, but since the projector was his own, he simply took the movies back home with him, and there in our own living room we could see them for ourselves, as often as we wanted, before those round silver drums the size of pizzas had to be returned to the devil’s devil they came from.
We saw movies. We saw every Bud Abbott and Lou Costello ever made, every Road to with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour swishing around in her discreet sarong, everything ever made with the Andrews Sisters in it. No Wizard of Oz, or, God forbid, Gone With the Wind, which couldn’t be got for love or money. Even Bogart was dicey, and the pastor was picky about anything with Rita Hayworth, let alone Garbo. But he let by the Bela Lugosi Frankenstein—plus Astaire and Rogers, Lana Turner, Claudette Colbert (nothing too smoldering of course), Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine in Jane Eyre. We had Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc, eventually Saint Bernadette. We laughed, we cried. Postwar war movies like The Five Sullivans were killers. The living room ran with tears for days.
I fell in love with the women Paulette Goddard and Katharine Hepburn played. Someday I wanted to have all their tomboy bravado and still look as steamy as Linda Darnell. There was only one male star I loved who did not look like my father, an Irishman named Brian Aherne. The square jaw, the open, smiling face, the soft Irish eyes and burled hair seemed to possess some archetypal otherness I craved. Seemed to promise a safety and joy I had forgotten.
But I kept this love darkly to myself, my secret this time.
