by Gay Talese
Among other things, the Mafia organized crime as a political weapon in a largely peasant society that was apolitical, my father explained. It catered to a need for power among a powerless class of people whose ever-changing foreign rulers and invaders were unaware of or unconcerned with their poverty and misery.
The Mafia filled the vacuum, my father said. Where the underclass lacked influence, the Mafia imposed its own influence. Where there was an impoverished economy controlled by an exploitative aristocracy, the Mafia introduced a lively trade in larceny, smuggling, extortion, and kidnapping for ransom. When a baron excessively taxed a farmer’s land or produce, a mafioso offered to negotiate for the farmer and, for a price, drive a hard bargain. And the mafioso drove an equally hard bargain, my father added, if hired by the baron to negotiate with the farmer.
Gradually, in this backward land, the Mafia leaders became middlemen, brazen functionaries whose roles would remain largely unchanged from medieval to modern times. And like the old ruling class from which it learned its methods, the Mafia shifted its manner easily and quickly from courtliness to violence. When an innocent woman was molested by a foreign officer or soldier of occupation, the Mafia conveyed to her family their words of condolence—and provided them the satisfaction of revenge with the knife.
While my father never condoned the Mafia, he always said he could well understand its continued existence. In lighter moments of exaggeration, he even suggested that were it not for the retaliatory threat of the Mafia in these places that were constantly disrupted by invaders and turmoil—and were it not also for the moral influence of the Church at its best, as personified by Saint Francis of Paola—the social and sexual history of Sicily and southern Italy, and indeed his own village of Maida, might well have been centuries of unrequited suffering and one-night stands.
4.
My mother had a cousin in Brooklyn who was a member of the Mafia, or so I always assumed, because, although he never held a job, he invariably arrived at the Brooklyn home of my mother’s parents for holiday dinners driving a big new car and wearing silk suits and shirts adorned with diamond cuff links and stickpins—and tilted forward on his head was a black bulletproof hat, a bowler, that was lined with steel.
I knew it was lined with steel because one weekend, after I had accompanied my mother and father to a large wedding reception in Brooklyn and was sitting on the edge of the dance floor near this cousin, he accidentally dropped his hat on my left foot while attempting to doff it—and my toe was swollen with pain for several days.
When I questioned my mother about him she explained that he was only a “distant” cousin who habitually visited her parents uninvited, and she added that since her marriage to my father, and her resettlement in Ocean City, she was relieved and pleased to be dwelling more than a hundred miles away from her Brooklyn cousin’s unwelcome appearances.
Then, on a very hot day in late August 1941, as I was roller-skating near my parents’ dress shop on the main street of Ocean City, I saw cruising slowly along the avenue, in search of a parking space, a large black automobile driven by a man wearing a dark jacket and a rounded black hat. The jaunty men of Ocean City wore straw hats on sunny days, and their suits usually were made of white flannel or beige linen; and since the vacationers at this summer resort were almost exclusively from Philadelphia or elsewhere in Pennsylvania, it was most uncommon to see an out-of-state automobile license plate, as I just had, bearing the stencil of New York.
Having little doubt about the driver’s identity, I skated as quickly as I could toward my parents’ store, then toe-hopped across the showroom rug with clattering awkwardness, past the disapproving glances of the salesladies, and impatiently waited to speak with my mother, who was then preoccupied with a customer. My mother had told me that I should never interrupt her when she was busy with a customer, and so now I watched quietly as she removed a dress from a hanger and handed it to a girdled, buxom woman who stood peeking through a half-opened door of a fitting room.
It was the final day of the big summer sale, and the racks still contained much unsold merchandise that my mother was eager to replace with the autumn stock, which was already uncrated but unpaid for, in the annex. It had been a slow season at the seashore, where the local economy was still in a slump from the paucity of vacation dollars caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s. Earlier, on the avenue, I had seen my father walking toward the bank, where, I knew from his breakfast conversation with my mother, he was hoping to improve the terms of an unfavorable loan. He had still not returned to the store when I stood waiting to forewarn my mother about her cousin. But before I could speak with her, I saw her cousin standing in front of the store window, a portly, black-hatted figure silhouetted in the sunlight, his eyes looking up at the sign above the door to confirm that he had arrived at his desired location.
Before he could get a glimpse of me, I skated into one of the empty fitting rooms and watched from behind a curtain, as curious as I was frightened. He walked slowly through the crowd along the counters and clothes racks back toward my mother, his broad face forming a smile, his hat clutched firmly in one hand while his other hand (extended beyond a gleaming cuff link) reached out in anticipation of a warm embrace.
When my mother saw him, she smiled with none of the enthusiasm she bestowed upon her customers. Although she offered her cheek for a light kiss, she quickly took his arm and guided him toward the far side of the showroom, away from the shoppers and salesclerks, and near the fitting room whose curtain I hid behind, fidgeting on motionless roller skates.
“Cousin Catherine,” I heard him say, “I was in the area on business, and since I was so close, I thought I’d drop by and spend the weekend with you, and maybe get a little sun.”
Immediately my mother shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said, “but I cannot have houseguests at this time of year.”
Stunned by her response, he was suddenly transformed, and with a frown and a raised eyebrow he said solemnly: “Catherine, I’m your cousin.”
Unaffected, my mother lifted her right hand and, with a pointed finger, directed his attention to the rows of unsold dresses extending the length of the store.
“In summertime,” she said, “only these are my cousins.”
Much as he tried to convince her to change her mind, my mother refused to accommodate him, and before my father had returned to the store, her cousin was gone.
I remained in the fitting room, not yet ready to abandon my place of concealment; and sitting carefully on the cushioned bench, I began with some difficulty to free my feet from the metal skates that were tightly clamped to the soles of my Buster Brown shoes. While I twisted and jiggled the warped skate key, I noticed that my father had arrived and my mother had now gone forward to speak with him. Although I was too far away to hear what was being said, I could see from the expression on my father’s face that he was not happy with what my mother was telling him.
A serious man by nature, he stood looking almost mournfully at the floor, his head nodding slowly as my mother spoke, his arms folded tightly across the front of his chest in a way that bunched up the material of the new gabardine jacket he had recently designed and tailored for himself—a jacket with narrow, sharply cut, high-pointed lapels that now seemed to rise slightly like the ears of an alerted rabbit. My mother had been inhospitable to a mafioso, a cousin no less—it was a serious social insult that in my father’s native southern Italy might well have induced a vendetta.
But as I watched my mother, there was no indication that she shared my father’s concern. She was American-born, after all; even though her parents in Brooklyn had come from the same part of Italy as my father, she had somehow separated herself from their old customs and fears—had created with her modish clothes and detached manner the modern woman that she appeared to be on this day, standing firmly in her high-heeled white shoes, as cool and unruffled as the slender window mannequins that she stylishly dressed and which she resembled. If she were con
cerned about anything after disposing of her cousin, it was probably that the transactions on this final day of the summer sale had not yet met her highest expectations.
My mother was betrothed to the dress business. As a young girl growing up in Brooklyn, she had outfitted her dolls with a varied wardrobe that she changed with the seasons, and she never permitted these pampered idols to be played with, or even touched, by any of her four sisters—my aunts, who, in recalling this fact to me years later, conveyed the suggestion of a slight yet everlasting sense of resentment toward the unsharing, aloof little girl my mother perhaps once was.
After high school she sold dresses in a large department store in Brooklyn, where she later became the assistant buyer; I think that had she not met my father, she would have been content to remain in that store for the rest of her working life. It provided my mother, who might otherwise have been restricted by the insularity of her Italian neighborhood and the prosaic expectations of her parents, with a passport to a larger America, to the grand bazaar of business and new ideas, of wishful thinking and whimsy, of temptation in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. Here she learned about marketing and money, and befriended fellow employees whose backgrounds and lives were different from her own—she often had lunch with the decorator and his boyfriend—and here she also studied the manners and moods of inveterate browsers and frugal consumers, impulse buyers and lavish spenders, bargain hunters and kleptomaniacs.
The store was a substitute for the travel opportunities and college education she lacked; within its gilded and spacious multistoried interior, she felt like a princess in a castle aglow with crystal chandeliers, surrounded by freshly cut flowers and serenaded by music. It contained countless gowns and robes and negligees and cocktail dresses and elegant gift boxes and also glass jewelry counters, which each day reflected the faces of promenading customers united in their avidity for what was desirable, enhancing, and fashionably contemporary.
But when she returned home in the early evening, wearing the colorful frocks that she had obtained from the store on her employee’s discount, she readjusted to the cloistered ambience of her family’s home, where the walls were hung with crucifixes and holy pictures, and where her parents were usually dressed in black. Before their marriage to each other, both of them had experienced tragic marriages during their younger years, and their early habit of wearing the color of mourning had outlasted the pain they had felt for those once mourned.
The first husband of my mother’s mother, Angelina, died of malaria in Maida during the early months of the marriage, and Angelina was left childless at nineteen and uncourted for three years—until she received in the mail a snapshot from Brooklyn of a willing widower who was a friend of her American immigrant uncle and his enterprising son, not yet distinguished for wearing black steel-lined bowlers.
Although the widower in the photograph appeared to be somewhat severe and at least ten years her senior, Angelina’s matchmaking relatives in America favorably described him as an energetic man who would be a most able provider. He worked for a real estate tycoon as a coachman and personal attendant in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and because of his reddish moustache and full head of red hair, he was known to all as Rosso.
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 be
droom 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.