Late in the evening Sean enters the apartment and drops his heavy knapsack on the kitchen floor, looks around and smells the air. “It smells of lemons,” he says.
“It must be the furniture polish I used.”
“This place hasn’t been this clean in months. You must be expecting paesani,” he says wryly.
He’s smiling and seems in a good mood and I tell him I’ve invited my family for Thanksgiving dinner. Then I ask if he has given some thought to what we discussed before he left.
Sean brightens up. “Yes, but first let me tell you that Di Principe’s appointment will be announced officially this week and so will my nomination to run.” He bends his waist as in a bow.
“Congratulations,” I say. “Are you excited?”
“Not yet. I’m too preoccupied about the work involved. The election will be called for after the holidays. It’s going to be intense from now on.”
I uncover the plate of pasta and meat Mother gave me at lunch, put it in the microwave, and set the table.
Sean takes a beer and, holding his chin, he says pensively, “I did some thinking while I was on the bus. You were right the other day. I think it may be time for us to make some important decisions.”
I wait for him to go on.
“I think we should start thinking about getting married before all the brouhaha of the election. If we don’t do it now, we may never do it,” he says, looking at the floor and nodding his head, as though agreeing with his own decision. “Yeah, I think it’s about time.”
I open my eyes wide and move my head back, as if I were doing a second take. “Gee, is this proposal for real?”
“It sure is,” Sean says smiling broadly. He keeps looking at the floor and pinches his chin as he usually does when he’s nervous. “I’ve been thinking of how little stability I’ve had in my life. It’s time I plant some solid roots.” He sits down.
“It’s quite a sudden change in your thinking, I mean … are you sure it’s what you want?” I sit down facing him, and try to read his pensive expression, but his eyes are still focused on the floor.
“We grow. We change, and I feel I’m entering a new phase in life,” he says and then looks up. “Aren’t you happy?”
“Yes, of course,” I say, “and it will make my mother very, very happy.” I smile, just thinking of my mother’s reaction.
He gets up. “Then it’s a deal!”
I get up too, and hug him. “When are you thinking … can I announce it to my family?”
“Of course … announce it to everyone. I guess we can set a date for just after the holidays. The by-election will be held sometime in February, so it would be good to do it just after Christmas, before the circus of the campaign starts.”
I put my hands to my face. “Wow, so soon! I can’t believe all this is happening now.”
“On that note, I’m going to eat my pasta, and then go to bed,” Sean says. “I’m beat.”
I kiss him and sit next to him. I feel elated. “I hadn’t expected this,” I say.
“Your mother will be especially happy when she hears that we’re getting married in a Catholic Church.”
“Are you serious?”
“We might as well go all the way.”
I watch Sean gulp down his pasta and then he gets up, and removes his tie and shirt to go to bed. “I’ll come to bed in a few minutes,” I say. “I’ll just have to put the turkey to defrost for tomorrow evening.”
“Don’t let me stop you,” Sean says. “I’m going to bed. I’m pretty tired.”
I kiss him again. Then I quietly call my mother to let her know the good news, but ask her to act as if they don’t know until Sean and I announce it at Thanksgiving dinner.
After filling the sink with cold water and placing the frozen turkey into it, I undress and slide into bed next to Sean. He’s already asleep, rolled over on his side. I lie still, facing the ceiling, savouring the elation of the proposal and anticipation of finally planning a wedding. I want it to be a low key but elegant reception with only the closest of friends and relatives, but still there is planning involved. Will I buy a ready-made white dress or have one sewed? Sean would certainly want J.P. to be his best man. Who would I ask as my maid of honour? I’m too agitated to fall asleep. There are other questions I should have asked Sean: Won’t he have to convert to Catholicism to get married in a Catholic church? Would he want children right away?
I get up to make myself a cup of tea. Even with the apartment vacuumed and the furniture polished, the place still looks like a third-rate hotel lobby. Will we buy a house? Alfonso will most certainly think of my place as a beggar’s home, compared to his semi-mansion. Homes are considered the most obvious symbol of success for someone like Alfonso and most of my paesani.
I tell myself that whatever we decide, I’ll be happy. Things are finally falling into place. I can finally make good on my promise that Sean and I would eventually get married, and his stay in my apartment can be justified to Angie’s family. The timing of Angie’s stay may be inconvenient, but I must keep my pledge to Lucia to help her daughter.
These thoughts keep me awake and too excited to go to bed, so I lie on the sofa and leaf through the old notebooks, until I fall asleep with the happy thought that my own story is unfolding as it should.
PART V
THE LANDING, 1957-1961
29. A NEW HOME
OUR NEW HOME WAS A basement apartment on Tenth Avenue in the east end of Montreal. When Uncle Peppe stopped in front of that red-brick apartment building and told us we were “home,” Luigi and I sighed with relief that our house was not one of the desolate shacks we saw along the stretch of country between Halifax and Montreal. I felt thrilled to have made it to the big city.
Tina had convinced Lucia and Pasquale to stop at our house for something to eat before being driven home by Pasquale’s friend, Joe Vaccaro. Nicodemo’s family was also at the train station and they shook hands as if they all knew each other. They declined our invitation, but the others followed us to the house and together we made a noisy and excited entrance.
My aunt Rosina, Father’s older sister, had prepared a feast for us: chicken soup, pasta, meat, and all kinds of pastries. After coffee was served in the largest cups we had ever seen, Lucia and Pasquale left with their friend.
“I had expected someone different for Lucia,” Father said. “He’s a bit of a cafone, but he’s a good man. Here, the less educated you are, the more money you make.”
Pasquale, with his Neapolitan friend, Joe Vaccaro, a real-estate agent turned contractor, had spoken of the land he had bought for development in Laval. Father had agreed to think about buying a lot, too. “Land is the surest investment,” he said. “It never loses value.”
After everyone left, Father gave us a tour of the apartment, which he had furnished himself. A large, brown furnace had a prominent place in the centre of the hallway. Father told us not to touch it or we’d get burned. We could hear and smell the fire blazing inside its belly. Father explained how it was fed by an oil tank in a shed at the back of the house. A pipe ran from the furnace to the ceiling, and snaked its way along the long corridor and into the kitchen. The living room was still bare, with only a folding bed in a corner for my brother. My bedroom too was furnished with only a bed. The kitchen was half furnished, with an electric stove but no fridge yet. Father was especially proud of the master bedroom, with the cream-coloured birch set, with its black, lacquered legs set on a slant. “It’s elegant and modern. We’re young too, no?” he said, winking at Mother. “After the summer, I’ll get a fridge, a TV, and a chesterfield, and then we’re complete.”
“We have plenty of time for that,” Mother answered. “Let’s be happy for what we have.”
30. FIRST WINTER, 1957
FATHER DECIDED THAT, BECAUSE THE English school was a long walk from our house, it would be best
to wait out the rest of the school year. I spent most of the winter watching our neighbours’ legs as they passed by our windows, with large Kik bottles and silver-foil pouches hanging from their hands. After I asked Father what the pouches contained, he bought me a bag of potato chips to taste. The saltiness jolted me at first, but when I had finished eating the bag, I craved more. From our kitchen window, which looked into our backyard, I watched children tumbling like balls on the snow banks, all bundled up in brightly-coloured snow pants, scarves, and mittens.
After our first week in Montreal, on a mild day, Father took us to St. Hubert Street to buy galoshes that we could slip over our shoes, so we could walk to Aunt Rosina’s house. Hers was a full house, with her four sons and with Uncle Peppe’s two brothers who also boarded with them. Father had also lived there before we came. Every Saturday night, we all sat in front of their TV set to watch Hockey Night in Canada, The Juliette Show, and then wrestling. An Italian, a Maestro D’Agostino, not only led Juliette’s musical band, but was married to the bubbly, blonde singer, Father proudly informed us.
Tina, accompanied by her brother, Francesco, often joined us. A friend of Francesco, Gaetano, joined the company after he became officially engaged to Tina. Francesco and Father spoke continually of music and the orchestra they had put together.
The other major weekly outing with Father was a long walk to an Italian grocery store on Belair Street. It was run by a large Sicilian family. The parents had just bought a farm, where they made the fresh ricotta and Italian cheeses that they sold at the store, while the sons and daughters ran the city business.
“You’ll see, this family is going to make a fortune because they work together,” Father said.
Mother stayed home for only one month, and then insisted she go to work in the factory with Tina. It was light work, making ladies’ lingerie, and Father didn’t object. He was still unemployed for the winter, but he went out every day to meet his friends at the Casa D’Italia, and he brought back an Italian newspaper, Il Progresso Italo-Americano. In the evening, we all listened to the Italian program on the radio and political commentaries of Camillo Carli. The news was rife with stories of the Hungarian revolution, and of children and women dying in the streets of Budapest.
Luigi stayed home too, but after school, one of our cousins would come by and they’d go out together. Luigi befriended Francine, a French girl who lived in our building, and my cousin, who went to French school, would translate for them. With no TV in the house and everyone out, I had lots of free time. I read the day-old Italian newspapers with news of social events happening in New York and Brooklyn. The paper also featured a serial story about outlaws hiding in some hills, and I cut out each installment to paste in a notebook. I wrote letters to my friends back home, telling them that the best time of day was the evening when the family was together and we listened to Italian songs on the radio.
I also liked it when Francesco, who played the guitar, came to the apartment accompanied by an accordion player and a saxophonist. With my father on trumpet, they practiced Latin American tunes in the living room.
Also, in the evenings, a parade of travelling salesmen found their way into our apartment, offering products and services that we had never heard of before. One man spread stainless steel pots and pans all over the kitchen floor. “Just like gypsies,” Mother said. Another vacuumed the mattresses with a tissue over the vacuum nozzle to show how well it sucked, and asked us to imagine how well it would clean our floors. An impeccably dressed insurance agent born in Venice, Alex Di Principe, came to offer advice about investing in life insurance.
One evening, Di Principe returned with Pasquale, accompanied by Joe Vaccaro, and a well-known personality in the community, Jack Russo, whose name was mentioned regularly in the local Italian newspaper. He organized feasts with local entertainers and fundraising balls. To my surprise Nicodemo accompanied the three men. He was dressed in a dark suit, his hair tamed into a brush cut. He had found work with Jack Russo. They had photographs of the development project in Laval, and sold lots for next to nothing, promising that in a few years they’d be developed into a model city called Citta Verde, or Ville Verte. They convinced my father to arrange for my uncle and his brothers to attend a meeting the following week. I was hoping to see Lucia again, but she stayed home. “She doesn’t like to go out,” Pasquale said. Lucia had already started the paperwork to sponsor her brothers’ emigration to Montreal.
“Qui tutto fa brodo,” my father used to joke. “Here everything makes soup,” he said about the mishmash of dialects and improvised occupations of the immigrants whose badly-spoken Italian betrayed their peasant background—with the exception of the insurance agent. My father and my uncle and his two brothers all bought land without needing to see the actual location, and Father even bought a life insurance policy from the Venetian. But my mother couldn’t be sold on the magic power of stainless steel, or on the vacuum’s ability to make her a better housewife. She served these people drinks, coffee, cookies, and even the special homemade Calabrese sausages that we had smuggled from Italy. After they left, Father always found something funny to say about each one, and that had us laughing for days.
During the day, to pass the time, I tried to take up drawing as a hobby, but all I managed to draw were geometric shapes. I spent hours fitting circles into squares. It was lonely not to see or speak to anyone for hours on end, and I found solace in the serial story of the fantasy world of the brigands, and of their lovers who left all behind to follow them. Mother left prepared lunches for me to eat. For snacks, I discovered the pleasure of Oreo cookies, and developed a special liking for peanut butter sandwiches. The brown wool dress I had brought from Italy got tighter and tighter, until I couldn’t button it anymore.
News of the misery of the people in Hungary who had to flee from their homes made me relive the frightful images of the plague-infested streets that Renzo had walked through in his search for Lucia, in the novel that had so occupied my time on the ship to this country. Lucia and Renzo had found each other in the end, but their time and place pulled further and further away from me.
31. SUNDAYS ON TENTH AVENUE, 1959
IT WAS ALWAYS ON SUNDAYS that I felt the most restless. Anticipation kept me edgy for the better part of the afternoons. When the day ended much like any other, disappointment set in, week after week, with the realization that my enthusiasm and my Sunday clothes had been for nothing.
Shifted and dislodged from another place, the queasiness that had overtaken my whole family while crossing the Atlantic had become for me a constant companion. I felt as if we had disembarked, but never arrived. We had landed on a shaky, movable dock—a no-man’s-land—safe from storms but neither here nor there. I wanted badly to go to shore, go somewhere less confining, run free and do things. But I was stuck in transit, and the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was as wide as the ocean.
We had been living on Tenth Avenue for a little over two years. A predictable Sunday routine had been established, and I was helpless in changing it. With my mother, I would walk to the French church, Sainte-Bernadette, on Seventeenth Avenue, to fulfill our Sunday obligations, while my father and brother stayed home. They only came to church on special occasions when we all walked to a basement Italian parish on Papineau Street. The Mass at Sainte-Bernadette was a formality—in and out in under forty-five minutes.
“It still counts,” Mother would say, even though she only understood a few words of the sermon.
The ragù for the pasta simmered slowly all morning while we were at Mass. My father kept it stirred, tasting it frequently, dunking chunks of bread into it, and seasoning it with the spices and herbs—nutmeg, cloves, rosemary—that he had learned to use when working in Milan. After lunch, my father and brother might practice their scales on the trumpet. Later, my brother, who was as fidgety as I was, would go off with his friends to flirt with Francine and her friends. I would be left
alone with my mother to tidy up and mope around, sulking at having nothing interesting to do. At the very most, my aunts and uncles might drop by for a visit. My cousins, all males, were not much company since they were only interested in hockey and wrestling.
I often wondered why we had left Italy just as things were beginning to look up there. Unlike Jewish immigrants or Hungarian refugees, we had not escaped persecution or even dire poverty. Yet having been sponsored by relatives to come across had felt like winning a lottery prize. It was as if a millionaire uncle or aunt had opened up their mansion, with a bountiful buffet all set out for us from which to pick and choose. How could our parents have refused their invitation? We left in hordes, looking for better feeding grounds. When I watched the graceful formations of geese flying south every fall, only to come back home in the spring, I thought how much rougher and less elegant our own transatlantic passage had been. Ill-informed, inadequately dressed, and retching all the way from the Rock of Gibraltar to Halifax.
After the first winter spent shut in at home, I ventured out and made friends with the French kids who lived in our building and I eventually learned French from them. I emerged chubby and round like an inflated soccer ball, and felt clumsy and shy.
Tenth Avenue was at its best in the spring when, coming out of its winter hibernation, it blossomed with crocuses, tulips, and daffodils. The scent of lilacs permeated the length of the street. From our building to the other end of the block, on Jean-Talon Street, stood rows of similar small, white, clapboard homes that, we later learned, were built by the Canadian government for war veterans. They seemed reproduced from a child’s simple crayon picture: triangle roof, square box body and windows, white picket fences, trellised arbors on the side for climbing clematis. Once the spring bulbs had run their brief course, the homeowners, mostly English-speaking, seemed to spend most of their leisure time cutting lawns, trimming hedges, and grooming and decorating their little rock gardens with petunias, begonias, wooden figurines, and plastic pink flamingoes.
The Women of Saturn Page 15