Unto the Sons (6 page)

So Angelina agreed to leave Maida and visit her relatives in Brooklyn for two months in order to become acquainted with Rosso. During that time Rosso came to dinner every Sunday night, sometimes bringing flowers, rarely saying very much, but often suggesting impatience by his mood or manner.

If dinner was late he would remove his gold watch on a chain from his black vest pocket and look at it, and five minutes later he would look at it again. His coachman’s compulsion for punctuality was matched by his coachman’s manner of sitting rigidly and straight-spined in his chair and holding his utensils firmly and upright, as if gripping the reins of a team of ill-tempered horses, and there was always in his expression a sense of intensity, the narrow-eyed look of a man who was accustomed to traveling into the wind, the fog, the rain, the sleet, and endless unseen but clearly imagined adversities.

Yet there was a redeeming stubbornness and strength about this man that Angelina found comforting, and it was also true that gentility, sensitivity, and a flair for romance were not quintessential requisites among Italian courting couples in America at the turn of the century. Life to them was a very practical matter—and it certainly was to this widow and widower who were getting no younger in Brooklyn in 1902. Angelina wanted children. Rosso wanted a wife. Her relatives wanted relief from the responsibility of finding her a husband. And so it was done. Angelina married Rosso, and thus began a lengthy relationship during which Angelina resigned herself, with the help of prayers and her own perseverance, to the burden of being Rosso’s wife.

He indeed proved to be a man of severity—the very quality that Angelina had perceived in him after first seeing his image in the photograph sent to her in Maida. And while he always maintained a formal air of courtesy toward her, she began to worry after the birth of their first child that his harshness, his temper that matched the fiery color of his hair, would sooner or later cost him his job—especially after she overheard him one morning screaming insults in the street at the stout, monocled Prussian real estate magnate who was his boss.

Much to her relief, however, the Prussian responded only by shrugging his shoulders and shaking his head slowly while he meekly climbed into his carriage. Then, after Rosso had hoisted himself vigorously up onto his seat and pulled his top hat down hard on his head, the carriage bolted forward jerkily as he cracked the horses’ hides twice with his whip.

With Rosso’s continued employment came a second child, then a third, and then three more in the next decade—a total of five daughters and one son, none of whom bore any physical resemblance to the others. The first child was an emerald-eyed brunette with olive complexion. The next was a florid-toned, brown-eyed redhead. The third, my mother, had auburn hair, very dark eyes, and fair skin. The fourth child was a tall, freckle-faced boy with light chestnut hair. The fifth was a plumpish, rosy-cheeked blonde who resembled a Wagnerian soprano. The sixth was a lissome, sallow-skinned girl with nut-brown hair and almond-shaped Eastern eyes who required only a silken veil and a snake to charm a sultan.

It was as if the genes and bloodlines of Rosso and Angelina had been interfused with the hybrid history of those southern Italians who for centuries had been invaded, conquered, reconquered, and partly absorbed by competing Greeks and Romans, Goths and Saracens, Normans and Franks; by the fleeing Albanians and their Turkish pursuers; by the Waldensian heretics and their papist inquisitors; by the Jacobin sympathizers and their cutthroat assailants led by the brigand-rostered army of Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo; by the Spanish Bourbon musketeers who were driven through southern Italy into Sicily by Napoleon’s rampaging cavalry, itself harassed by Lord Nelson’s gunboats, which controlled the Mediterranean and soon landed British troops on the besieged beachfront of Maida itself.

As the eyes of Angelina’s offspring reflected the assorted tints and tones of a Byzantine mosaic, so did her children’s different personalities and conduct represent the heterogeneity of southern Italy.

The first daughter was a born domestic who clung to her mother’s apron strings as a child and remained close to Angelina until the latter’s
death, by which time the devoted, aging daughter, having recently been married for the first time (to a widower), was too old to bear children of her own.

The red-haired second daughter grew up as a rebel and agnostic who defied her father’s will in accepting a nighttime job as a telephone operator (Rosso claimed that most of the Brooklyn operators moonlighted as prostitutes), then defied him again by dating a politicized factory worker who subscribed to Communist periodicals and played trombone on weekends in Broadway orchestras; finally she became an art student who carefully studied, and tried to improve upon, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

The next child, my mother, was the family escapist and fantasist, who covered her bedroom walls with film posters of young Lillian Gish, and invariably kept her door closed to avoid contact with her family and their guests; when she was not sewing dresses for her dolls or modeling her own clothes in front of the mirror, she sat rocking slowly in her white wicker chair, listening to her music box, and imagining that she was somewhere else.

Her brother, the fourth child in the family, became a Golden Gloves boxer before graduating from high school—he drifted prematurely into the sport after being banished from class for hitting a teacher who had called him “dago.” When not in the boxing ring, he was employed by his father’s boss, the Prussian, as an attendant in a large garage in which were parked several delivery trucks, and also a black automobile owned by the cousin who wore the steel-lined bowler. Rosso also worked there. One day, on instructions from the boss, Rosso told his son to drive a laundry truck to a certain Brooklyn pier, where men would be waiting to unload its contents. After arriving at the pier, the young man noticed that concealed under stacks of tablecloths and bed linen were several cases of whiskey, which were surreptitiously loaded into an awaiting motorboat.

The fifth child in the family, the Teutonic-looking blonde, was the resident glutton and practical joker, a young woman of earthy humor and an indulgent nature. She smoked; she drank; she generously colored her face with rouge and lipstick; and on weekends, when she also helped her eldest sister and mother with the grocery shopping, she served as the kitchen’s pasta taster and tester before the food was placed on the table for the big Sunday dinner.

Angelina’s final daughter, as the baby of the family, grew up accustomed to being pampered and adored, was spared most domestic chores, and ventured through life with a blithesome disposition. A teenaged flapper
during the 1920s and always a bit of a coquette, she was the most attractive of Angelina’s daughters, the best dancer by far, the most sought after by men, the most socially liberated and politically liberal. After divorcing her husband, she befriended a man who was black.

If Angelina and Rosso’s six children had anything in common, it was probably an enduring affection for their mother and a disaffection for their father, a man whose support of them was primarily financial (and even that proffered in a begrudging manner) and who preferred taking his evening meals alone in the kitchen, served by his wife
precisely
at seven o’clock, and without any commotion or conversation coming from the children with whom he never learned to communicate.

Part of his problem was language itself. Rosso insisted on speaking his brand of south Italian dialect in the home, a dialect that his children never fully understood, or wanted to understand, for in their ignorance of his words they more easily avoided the responsibility of dealing with him directly. What was clearly needed in this family was someone to serve as an interpreter between the children and their parents, and also to translate for Rosso certain business letters or documents that, because written in formalized English, were beyond his comprehension.

Since Rosso would not trust an outsider to perform this function, and since none of his children would voluntarily do it, he ordered my more obedient mother one day to assume the role of his interpreter and intermediary with the English-speaking world. She had learned to speak and write English perfectly in primary school, and now, after returning home each afternoon from high school, she would be tutored in Italian by a white-bearded language professor who had been born in Maida but lived in the neighborhood.

Within a year, my mother spoke and read Italian with sufficient competence to clarify all the family problems of communication, if not to solve the problems themselves. One interesting result of this experience for her, however, was that in becoming her father’s domestic secretary and confidante, in dealing with him each day in his own dialect, my mother began to understand this contentious and estranged individual. From her perusal of his old letters, foreign documents, and mementos—and from what he occasionally told her during uncharacteristically candid moments—he emerged as a wounded, vulnerable man who was much more of an escapist than she: he was a fugitive from some dark center in his soul, a helpless misanthrope who had fled the austere foundling home into which he had been placed by vaguely remembered relatives.

As a teenager he joined a boatload of illegal aliens and was employed
as a laborer’s apprentice in Brazil, but he loathed the life in South America and returned to Italy two years later with enough savings to purchase two horses and begin working as a teamster and carriage driver. The economy of southern Italy was then at a starvation level, however, and most of his passengers in the 1880s were men abandoning the dry soil and horizonless hills, bearing heavy valises made of wood: they were en route to the rail terminal to await the Naples-bound train that would take them to the trans-Atlantic ships headed for the promised land of the United States.

In the town square of Maida, as in villages throughout the peninsula, there were billboards declaring that good jobs awaited healthy, hardworking men in America. The signs noted that steamship tickets would be paid in advance by American employers, who would later be recompensed by deductions drawn from the workers’ salaries.

And so from the hill towns and fishing villages of Italy, young men planned their departures, and Rosso carried many of them in his wagon along the dusty roads away from aging parents and newly wed brides and small children who waved until the wagon faded from view. Rosso heard their final words, saw their tears, observed their embraces and kisses, but, a stranger to intimacy, he had no idea how they truly felt during these parting moments. He knew only that when he returned to the village, life seemed to be changing.

There was one change in particular that he watched with mixed pleasure each Sunday in the town square. This had always been a male preserve, a place where the village men gathered (while their wives attended Mass or were occupied at home) to drink liquored coffee and argue over local politics, or to stroll around, arm in arm, showing off their best suits, and smoking cigarettes or small cigars as they talked business or exchanged bawdy jokes, or casually admitted things to one another that women would confess most reluctantly to a priest.

This procession around the square was called the
passeggiata
. And although it took place in the village’s most public place, it was nonetheless a private affair. Except now, as Rosso was becoming aware, a certain number of younger women were flouting the once accepted exclusion of females and, without invitation or explanation, were joining in the path of the
passeggiata
.

Like the men, these women walked arm in arm and spoke animatedly among themselves. While they kept their distance from male couples who walked in front or behind, and avoided making eye contact, they were in no way deferential, nor did they seem to be intimidated by the other men
who sat almost leering in the cafés, saying nothing but sometimes making sibilant sounds as they forcefully exhaled the cigarette smoke through their teeth.

This new development in the square did not, of course, escape the insatiable curiosity of Maida’s more traditional women—including those elderly, dark-clad ladies who missed nothing even while they sat outside their houses facing the wall, adhering to the discreet style of the ancient Greek and Arab women who once basked in this same sunlight. Nor did it go unnoticed by the village’s nubile young virgins who, wearing white linen blouses and festive skirts, stood on the balconies overlooking the
passeggiata
as they arranged flowers and furtively exchanged quick glances with the unmarried men of their age who gathered around the fountain on Sundays, singing songs and playing guitars.

The walking women were other men’s women; they were the wives of the ambitious young men who had left the village to make money in America. They were therefore women who were worthy of respect, and in church on Sundays they were often seen lighting candles at the altar and, presumably, praying for the safe and speedy return of their spouses, who were sometimes known to remain away from the village for two years or even longer. Yet very few of these women who were long deprived of their husbands appeared to be suffering from grief or depression. While they may occasionally have felt in private some kinship to widowhood, in public they radiated gaiety and confidence, and they often dressed in the same light colors of the hopeful village maidens. Which was why they were called “white widows.”

There was, to be sure, a certain amount of gossip about them, and all that it took to activate the village’s most tireless tale-bearing tongues was for one of the white widows to be observed in church not receiving the holy sacrament with the regularity of the other female communicants. Envy, of course, circulated as freely as the ever-present flies through the pews and high-vaulted naves, and even the most secure of traditional women felt at times threatened by these relatively free, semi-married
signore
who, thanks to the profitable efforts of their husbands overseas, had more money to spend on themselves and their children than did the wives of the local men who had chosen to remain on the farms or to struggle as vendors or artisans.