by Gay Talese
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.
Still, the money sent to the white widows from America bolstered the local economy. The widows spent it at the food market, invested it in farm improvements, and shared it with their parents or in-laws or other relatives in whose homes they often dwelled, providing the primary means of support. Such a position of economic power had never before been held by women of ordinary families, and with this new power the white widows personified an evolving matriarchy, a sorority of sorts composed of strong-willed individuals who would assume in their husbands’ absence full responsibility for the rearing of children and the managing of matters of proprietary interest. They also decided how the
y would spend the idle hours of the day and perhaps part of the night.
During this period there was considerable marital stress because a majority of Italy’s pioneering migratory workers were not yet able or willing to transfer their families to America. Despite the money earned there, the workmen during the 1880s and 1890s usually lived in teeming boardinghouses or in railway boxcars or in the grim barracks of cold and remote company towns where, instead of rising each morning to such soothing village sounds as the ringing of church bells or the crowing of roosters, they were aroused at dawn by harsh factory whistles that summoned them into coal mines, steelyards, stone quarries, or gravel pits, from which they emerged exhausted at twilight, covered with dust and dirt and sweat, and infected with a foul temper.
So most of these men wisely kept their wives and children in the familiar surroundings of the village, convinced that the sunny poverty of Italy was much more habitable and healthful than the polluted prosperity of America. While the men were often made aware through letters of their wives’ loneliness and feelings of abandonment, they assumed the women knew that these years of separation would cease as soon as enough money had been earned and saved to achieve economic solvency in southern Italy.
Most of the men sent expressions of affection and reassurance through the mail, along with money, American-made dresses and shoes, and toys for the children. Sometimes, on impulse, the men themselves sailed across the sea, arriving at the Maida station to pay a surprise visit to their families on the occasion of a wedding anniversary, or a birthday, or to attend the annual festival of Saint Francis of Paola, which throughout southern Italy was regarded as a joyful day of spiritual solidarity.
My maternal grandfather, Rosso, was often the first person to greet these arriving men at the station, and during the forty-minute ride uphill in his wagon, laden with luggage and parcels containing gifts, he would inform the men of the latest local happenings and hear their tales of overseas adventures and experience vicariously their pleasure in returning home.
One morning at the terminal, however, Rosso was approached by a man who stepped off the train without luggage. Seeming sullen and impatient, he asked that Rosso immediately transport him to the inn located at the crossroads near the Norman wall that bordered the western edge of Maida. Rosso had never before seen this man, who was neatly dressed in what Rosso assumed to be an American-made suit; while the man said little during the ride, he did confide that a recent family quarrel had forced his return to Italy. But, he added, he was sure that he could solve the problem within a day’s time, and he asked that Rosso pick him up at the crossroads on the following morning so that he could board the noon train back to Naples.
Rosso was there the next day, as requested, and during the ride back to the station the man sat quietly on the bench, gazing pensively at the countryside and at times touching his eyes with his fingers as if wiping away tears.
Upon arrival at the terminal Rosso received his payment, and, after nodding in thanks, he watched the man board the dust-covered train that slowly edged forward to the sound of hissing steam and the clanging of bells. Rosso then returned to the village, where later that evening he was approached by the police and questioned about the man he had taken to the train.
Two people in Maida had been fatally shot with pistol bullets during the night, the police told Rosso. One was a woman who had been married to a worker in America. The other victim was a man who resided in Maida and was presumed to be her lover. Rosso told the police the little that he knew, and the desk clerk at the inn could add nothing of significance because the man had entered the inn only for a drink at the bar, then had left without registering to spend the night.
The police did not appear irritated or disappointed by this insufficient information, nor did they say that they planned to continue their investigation. It was, after all, a crime of familial passion that was hardly uncommon in southern Italy, where there had long existed a tradition of understanding, if not respect, for a cuckold who sought revenge by killing his wife—in this case, a white widow—and her illicit lover. So the police released Rosso and the desk clerk from further questioning, and soon the case was closed without great inconvenience to anyone except the couple who had perhaps once been in love.
Rosso himself was in love at this time—not with one of the public ladies who paraded in the passeggiata, but with a modest and dainty young woman whom he had often seen as she sat in her balcony and whom he had recently been honored to escort home from church in his carriage.
Her name was Rosaria. Her father, whom Rosso knew slightly, was an elderly, gimp-gaited widower who had been injured decades earlier while serving as a soldier in the army of General Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero whose triumphs during the 1860 revolution had finally unified the peninsula and liberated southern Italy from more than a decade of severe rule under the Spanish Bourbon kings.
Rosaria’s father was now inebriated much of the time, and, except for his soldier’s pension that he irregularly received, he relied, for his livelihood, on the money his only daughter earned as a housekeeper in a deteriorating palazzo owned by one of Maida’s last noble families.
The speed with which her father accepted Rosso’s marriage proposal both surprised and piqued Rosaria, who might well have wondered if her father had been influenced by the fancied convenience of having a carriage-owning chauffeur for a son-in-law. But she herself welcomed the opportunity to quit her job at the palazzo. Working as an outside housekeeper in southern Italy was deemed a degrading occupation for a young woman—the assumption being that a housekeeper was sometimes expected to provide, and was sometimes agreeable to providing, sexual favors in secret to the head of the household or perhaps to one of his sons.
In Rosaria’s case, such intimacies had indeed occurred between herself and the baron’s second son. But later, as her feelings of guilt increased along with her concern that a public scandal would nullify her chances of marriage to an eligible suitor of her class, she became more amenable than she otherwise would have been to her father’s urgings that she marry Rosso.
Rosaria married Rosso in the winter of 1884. Within a year she gave birth to a son and two years later had a second son, both of them with Rosso’s red hair. Rosso was happy with his life, but in the years ahead it seemed impossible with his earnings as a carriage driver adequately to support his household, which included not only his wife and young sons but also his father-in-law.
While complaining of his financial difficulties one day to a friend visiting Maida from America—a man who worked as a construction foreman for a wealthy Prussian realtor in New York—Rosso was told that the realtor was expanding his business and would soon be needing additional help. Rosso’s friend volunteered to speak to the boss about arranging Rosso’s ship passage. Months later, Rosso received a job offer from New York, and after promising to send for his family as soon as he could manage it, he sailed to America.
He spent the next year working first as a laborer in his friend’s construction gang and then as the boss’s carriage driver and the superintendent of a large building that his employer owned on Hester Street in lower Manhattan.
A spacious, empty apartment in this building was made available to Rosso, who quickly sent word to his wife to prepare the family for the move to America. But her response to his letter was unenthusiastic, and she continued in polite but evasive ways to delay the departure from Italy for more than a year. Her excuses were attributed at times to the illness of her father, or to the fact that her sons were yet too young for the trip. Or she complained of various household complications, or of her own mild but endless ailments. The date of the passage seemed to fade further and further away.
And then one day in New York, Rosso heard from a friend who had just returned from visiting Maida that Rosaria was having an affair with the baron’s son. It was more than an affair, the man quickly corrected himself, for she was now pregnant with this other man’s child.
Rosso was overwhelmed by
astonishment and grief. For days he could barely eat or speak. He could hardly believe what he had been told. It was a betrayal so insulting that, rather than inspiring him to a violent revenge, it made him internalize his pain, so that it soon became a poison that was to circulate within his system for the rest of his life. It poisoned not only his memory of his wife but his affection for his sons as well. His wife and sons became dead to him—destroyed, gone forever from his life; and in private he disowned them, vowing never again to see them, or desire to see them, even if they came crawling to his door. They were all as dead to him as they would have been had he taken a gun and shot them himself.
From that time on, in Brooklyn, Rosso wore the dark clothes of mourning, bearing in private this anguish and bitterness through his second marriage, to my grandmother Angelina, and the birth of his six American children.
When my mother told me this story, and often elaborated upon it in ways that presented her upbringing—and that of her siblings—as hopelessly connected to Rosso’s forlorn and unforgettable past, she left little doubt in my mind as to why she was eager to leave her father’s home as soon as she could find someone to whom she could give her love unreservedly. In 1929 she married the man who would become my father, and she immediately dissociated herself from Brooklyn as she resettled along the Jersey shore, near the boardwalk, where it was the custom for American women to dwell in a modern world in the brightly colored dresses of their choice, with the men of their choice. She left the long shadow that was cast on Brooklyn sidewalks for a place where she hoped to remain forever distant from the conspicuous mourning of her father for a white widow, and the unwelcome visits of a cousin who wore a steel-lined black hat.
5.
While my mother gained through marriage a kind of liberation she never could have known in her father’s house, it was my destiny to become the dutiful only son of an exacting tailor who presumed to possess the precise measure of my body and soul; and it was my unavoidable birthright to wear the customized clothes that reflected his taste, advertised his trade, and reaffirmed his talent with a needle and thread.