The Family of Max Desir

by Robert Ferro

  With their brother gone the Defilippo sisters closed in on Angela like cats. This was their chance and they knew it. Until then they had brought a certain restraint to their criticism, Angela being after all the future capo’s wife, peasant or not. But now they complained about everything, her habits, her manners, the way she talked. She had one idiosyncrasy, a hobby she refused to give up, which infuriated the sisters and sent them rushing in a rage from window to window of the villa, which like everything else had been rebuilt after the earthquake. Angela liked to fish. Her father and grandfather had been fishermen. Both had drowned. She fished and thought of them.

  Occasionally, in fine weather, she would dress as she had before her marriage, and with tackle from a boathouse under the terrace, would fish incognita from some rocks nearby. She knew this was wrong, that sometimes the three sisters wept with indignation and shame and broke things. But she didn’t fish often, and always went out early, just after dawn. She stood barefoot on the rocks, holding the rod like a parade flag, her skirts hitched up to her knees, as the sun rose, a deep vermilion ball over Calabria. Afterward, for the sisters, came the worst part. Angela would scale and clean the fish herself, and cook it in a kitchen full of servants who thought her crazy. Behind her back she was called La Pescatora, the fishwife. If somehow the sisters could have arranged, through some magnificent bargain, to have her struck by lightning while she fished from the rocks, they’d have done so.

  One morning when Danilo had been gone several months, Angela entered the kitchen with her catch and found the three sisters waiting. This time it was they who carried on like fishwives, while the servants stood about fascinated. Concetta, who had been crippled in the earthquake, so that each year she seemed to grow smaller and more gnarled, was the most vicious.

  You bring us nothing but shame and smelly fish, she cried in a small, high, monkey voice. The other two joined in. You smell of fish. You reek. Who knows what you do in the boathouse …

  Angela stood in the doorway holding an eel and three sea bass tied together at the gills. Four-year-old Marie, who had gone out with her mother, stood at her side.

  Do you think it’s right for the little girl to watch her mother play on the rocks? Concetta screeched. She will grow up to be trash like you.

  The raised voices, the hate in the room, caused the child to cry and Angela, who had said nothing, patted her on the head. Then, taking the cluster of fish in both hands, she rushed at the sisters with a cry, swatting at them wildly as they screamed and ran about the kitchen. She chased them and hit at them until the fish came apart and the sisters were battered to the floor.

  That afternoon she piled all her opulent wedding gifts into a cart, which she dragged to town and sold for passage money to New York, one way, for herself and Marie. They were gone within hours, and Angela never in her life saw any of the Defilippos again. She arrived with Marie on Ellis Island, Danilo’s name and address pinned to their lapels. He came to claim them, stunned, exhil-arated by the madness, the irretrievability of the act. Angela said she would never go back. They would stay forever in New York, become Americans.

  On the advice of earlier arrivals, Danilo had rented two rooms in the Italian section on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He had suffered a torment of homesickness that was not completely alleviated by Angela’s arrival with Marie. What of the others and his connection and responsibility to them? Nor did he like New York, with its noise, crowds and expense. Half of the money he had brought with him was gone. He felt he had been trapped. He, who at home would have directed two factories of garment workers, now became a local tailor, one of hundreds. Instead of the comfortable life they might have led in Messina, surrounded by a substantial family—the life he had offered Angela—they lived now at her station, as immigrants, working hard and keeping to themselves. After a time he stopped asking her to go back. And then she was pregnant again and all thoughts of returning to Messina were dropped. After Danilo, Jr, came a third and last child, Franco—Dan and Frank as Marie called them. She was twelve when they moved to Brooklyn, to Avenue U, a comfortable Italian neighborhood where customs were similar to what they’d have been in Messina, if in an American mode. They shopped from the same horsedrawn carts, the same pasticcerias. Everyone spoke Italian, in various dialects; only the children learned English, or had contact with people who were different.

  From the beginning letters came from Messina, begging Danilo to return, to enjoy what was his. But Angela said she would die first. In Messina she was nothing. Here everyone was nothing, which was at least something. The letters brought news, gossip and occasionally a photograph, an elaborate production, like a picture still from an opera or the beginning of a painting with props, and a gaze held so long as to have taken on alarming individuality and presence. Danilo sent back pictures of his own. One showed Marie, Angela and him sitting in a little, thin-masted skiff, before a painted backdrop of an Italian lake. On the back of the photograph, which later Marie had enlarged, she wrote: Summer 1913, Marie four years old, Mom twenty-three, Dad twenty-eight. It was the first picture Danilo sent to Messina. Perhaps the three of them in the little boat was meant to show that they had all made it safely to the other side.

  He sent other pictures that later Max saw in Messina, of Marie in school—Clara Bow had infected them all with perfect mouths—of Dan and Frank, first in their playsuits and later in the uniform of the American Army; of John and Marie in their engagement and wedding pictures, in which Marie is turned to look over her train as if over a savanna of white satin. After the war started the letters from Italy changed. An evolving smugness was replaced by uncertainty, then anxiety, then fear and need. Could Danilo send food and medicine? Throughout the neighborhood in Brooklyn people were receiving similar requests. Please send penicillin. Send food. Italy was sick and starving.

  The post office prescribed measurements for the packages and Danilo made them of heavy cloth to save weight. Rather than use twine he masterfully sewed them shut. More of the family wrote to ask for help—in-laws, cousins. Packages went out every week. He sent everything he could. After a time the requests were for different things, less of necessity than of opportunity; not just food but particular foods; not just clothes but a red dress, a blue scarf. Angela wanted to know why she and her children were sacrificing to buy material for red dresses and blue scarves. Danilo said he would stop sending the packages when they began asking for wristwatches. Which they did, and he did.

  In 1948, after the war, thirty-five years after leaving it, Danilo returned to Messina for a stay of three months. He was sixty-three. He asked Angela to accompany him this last time but she refused. In the three decades of letters from Sicily they had never mentioned her by name. Dan, Frank and Marie were all married and could not go, nor would they have wanted to; and so Danilo went alone.

  He had not quite understood the necessity or effect of the packages of food and medicine. For long periods of the war twenty or thirty of the family had lived on nothing else. Specifically, the penicillin had saved the lives of three of them. When he stepped off the boat train in Messina everyone was there, forming a crowd which at first he took to be travelers going to the mainland. They saw him and called his name. Then he recognized certain faces, older and changed, like music played slower. He saw their tears, their outstretched arms, and nearly swooned in the overwhelming embrace of family.

  He stayed the summer, living at once an exaggerated and abbreviated version of the life he had missed. He sat on the terrace of Contemplations looking out over the balustrade at the sea, at the long low rise of Calabria, where the forests had burned. He had come back because his life was nearly over. He wanted to see how it had happened that he, out of all of them, had become separated from the others. Why had he not hid elsewhere, or somehow convinced Angela to return, or simply gone off and fought in Turkey? Would he so easily have been killed? Why had his whole life kept him from where he belonged?

  He wondered what he had missed. What point had tnere
been to it other than the vague supposition that flight had saved his life and was therefore the essential fact of his existence? To have survived elsewhere was better than dying here, he supposed, but at the price of exile. He realized that for the past thirty-five years he had been someone and something other than that which at this moment he had again become. Sitting on the terrace of Contemplazione, he felt at last transported into the center of the endless daydream that had filled all his hours and years of sewing. What were they like? What were they doing? Did they think of him?

  He visited the mausoleum to see the crypts of his mother and the daughter who had died in infancy. He could not remember his mother in life. Her corpse had eclipsed whatever existence she had led, both in memory and in actual years; she was now much older in death than she had been in life, and was remembered only for her conspicuousness—a grotesque waxen doll to replace the sweet, vague softness of recollection. The glass coffin was intact although they no longer changed her gown or replenished the vacuum, and the rictus of a kind of imminent scream—like a sneer—seemed to have claimed the lips. But the flesh was uncorrupted, the hair was dark and seemed firmly attached to the scalp; and altogether, as an artifact, the mummy provided Danilo with what he most needed—a reminder of the fact, or of the illusion, that this object had once been his mother, but was no more.

  This was the story Marie told Max.

  Marie Defilippo met John Desiderio at the engagement party of a mutual friend. John’s sister Clara had been a classmate of hers and Marie knew about the Desiderios, a large poor family of five sons and two daughters who lived a few blocks away on Avenue J.

  John was black-haired and blue-eyed, thanks to the Norman conquest of Caltanissetta one sunny afternoon and the rape of all its women; he was tall, handsome, ambitious and given to a certain flashiness of style. Marie caught his eye at once. She wore a peach satin dinner gown with a low back that her father had made for her, as he made all her clothes. She had always been dressed like a princess. At fourteen she had had a coat trimmed with ermine tails. Her dark hair was piled on her head. The other girls beside her were naturally pretty in some cases, plain or unappealing in others, but with none of Marie’s fineness. John saw immediately she was the kind of woman who could help him better himself.

  He took her to a fine restaurant in Manhattan, having hired a car for the occasion. Until then it had been a question of his choosing. Anyone who knew him could see all he had to do was choose; no girl would ever fail to say yes. But then he removed her wrap and saw the way she sat, the way the waiter thought she was rich and showed it. He realized he might not be able to do without her. She was what he needed, it seemed, more than she needed him.

  Three separate things might have kept her from accepting him: he was a year younger than she, he was an amateur boxer, and she was nearly engaged to another man. Later, when she told these things to Max, she was quite proud of the fact that this other man had also made something of himself and become rich. At eighteen, John had begun a boxing career with a middleweight Golden Gloves championship and a manager who had him file his teeth—dull or sharp, Max never knew. He lied to Marie about his age, quit boxing, and kept company with her for a year, paying the kind of devotional and polite court that Danilo Defilippo insisted upon for his daughter the principessa mancata.

  In 1934, John paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for a honeymoon trip on the Rotterdam to Bermuda—this at the height of the Depression. To the neighbors in Brooklyn, it was as if they had gone to the moon. The trip was one of a series of grand, impulsive moves, of a generous, confident and unprotected nature, and part of an overall attitude of promise and ambition by which John had convinced her of his seriousness and won her. In a sequence of snapshots from the honeymoon, Marie is poised on a rock in the surf, carrying on like Rita Hayworth; then by the ship’s rail, dressed for the afternoon in a cloche hat; dapper John in gray by the same rail, before a bleached-out sea. They returned home and moved out of Brooklyn, tracing their parents’ steps back to Manhattan. This it seemed was the way out of the maze. Then across the river to New Jersey, the Hudson River having seemed nearly as wide as the Atlantic, and as difficult to cross.

  THEY LIVED IN AN APARTMENT AT THE TOP of an old house in Englewood, on a quiet, tree-lined street, the first of three suburban arrangements they would have together over the next forty years, this one the simplest, with dimity curtains and painted chairs in the kitchen, a white chenille spread on the bed. Marie was soon pregnant with John, Jr. She walked to town for exercise until the seventh, nearly the eighth month. Many women seemed to be pregnant and out walking. John found work as the underforeman of a local distillery. He invited the foreman home to dinner, to meet Marie. She did not understand he was a foreman and thought him very young to be so influential. She asked him why he hadn’t brought his young lady and he replied that he had not been as lucky in life as John; he had no young lady.

  Subsequently, the foreman invited John for a drink after work. They discussed their ambitions; the foreman gave John advice. John suggested a new system of inventory, a new arrangement of certain of the bottling machines. They had a few drinks although John disliked liquor and was impervious to its effects. The foreman, however, quickly got drunk. Hanging on John’s neck he said what a helluva guy he was, an Italian stud. John pushed him away and left. Sometime later John went to the distillery after hours to retrieve something and heard voices in the changing room. He discovered the foreman and the night watchman having sex. The foreman had his pants down around his ankles and was leaning over the sink. John had been unaware of this biological possibility between men and was nauseated by the discovery.

  The watchman was dismissed, the foreman resigned and John was promoted. He worked there for five more years; then in 1939 took a much better job as plant manager of a company that made a mild tonic for the liver with a national reputation based on discreet advertising and a certain unproved placebo effect. It was the president of the tonic company who suggested that John shorten his name from Desiderio to Desir. Marie thought the idea shameful but yielded to the force of the argument—Italians were greaseballs then—and the beauty of the new name. She enjoyed the sound of Marie Desir. It had bothered her to have to spell out Desiderio all the time. The name was legally changed, for themselves and for Jack, and Robin—Roberta—who had just been bom. When the next child came Marie was determined to compensate for the loss of three vowels with an Italian first name. Massimo Desir was bom in 1941. John, however, neatly outmaneuvered Marie by calling the baby Max, a name she disliked because it sounded German. You can’t win, she said.

  By the time their last child—named Angela but called Penny—was bom in 1943, they had moved from Englewood and settled comfortably into their penultimate house, in their penultimate town in New Jersey— Indian River. They all lived there for the next twenty-five years.

  III.

  THE HOUSE IN INDIAN RIVER HAD A TALL GABLE in front, two balconies, and a large chimney that rose up its back like a spine. It had been built in 1936, was made of brick, and was surrounded by enormous old trees. The street on which it was a comer house, was paved with white concrete squares edged with tar, like a Mondrian, and was covered over with a canopy of linden branches. Many of these trees were eventually lost but Max could remember when they lined both sides of the street with a grand, antebellum regularity.

  Marie and John had chosen the town carefully. Indian River had pre-Revolutionary touches. General Washington had come through from Valley Forge on his way to fight the Battle of New York, and had forded the river at a point now given over to canoeing in summer and skating in winter. The river meandered through town with an exaggerated indolence, making seven major turns back on itself. When you went to town or came home from school you crossed the river two or three times. In the nineteenth century this meandering had inspired the mayor and aldermen to sponsor an annual water festival, with extravagant floats and fireworks on the river, with competitions, games, bake-offs
and concerts on the banks. Sousa came. When Max was fifteen the festival was revived for one year. It was held in Indian Park on and around the lake, where the river either started out or ended up, depending on your view; with extravagant floats, fireworks, competitions, games, bake-offs, concerts. A large rocket misfired and fell into the crowd, badly burning several people and putting out the eye of a child. The river was just as it had been, while everything else had changed.

  Indian River was on a planet different from the one that had produced the Lower East Side. When John’s family came to visit they were stiff, though momentarily jocular in front of a camera, and dressed either too warmly or too well. They brought white boxes of sweet cookies and cannoli. In their minds this was the country, ineffably American. They were back in the city by dark.

  Besides the park and the winding river, the end of town where Max lived was bordered by farmland—expanses of fields and meadows, of blank spaces from another era, where the tops of hills and trees met the sky and the air smelled of grass and turned earth. He and the dog played in the woods, the same as if he had been bom a thousand miles to the west and fifty years earlier; except that as they grew the town grew. By the end of his childhood the farmland was gone. He and his friends found a dead cat one afternoon, and after dragging it in a wagon from house to house to find its owner, stuffed it between the walls of a house under construction, on the site of a tree fort they had taken great care to build. Subsequently a man and his wife moved in and made their local reputation on the strength of a new device that opened their garage door automatically.

  John and Marie’s bedroom had a fireplace and two closets, one in each corner of the same wall, his father’s on the left and his mother’s on the right. They were apparently equal, and each occupied the isosceles space created by the dormer roof. But to Max, perhaps because of the difference in clothes—the colorful, silky, voluminous folds of dresses compared to the prosaic hangings, hats, ties and shoes neatly arranged—it seemed that his father’s side contained less space; as if, he concluded one day, a part of it had been set aside for something secret, a space perhaps, or a tiny hidden room. It was as if Max were trying to enhance the house, by giving it something he thought the pink mansion at the end of the street must have. And later, in discovering that an ornate brass andiron in the fireplace had a loose piece to it that swiveled, he imagined this was the switch that opened the secret place in his father’s closet. In his mind he saw a little panel snap open, to reveal a small dark interior space just behind the suits and hats. In it would be the implements of another life, in another world.