Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  Gaetano was unaware of the tension between the young women and men of his village during his first days home, prior to the stabbing incident. He had, in fact, been gratified by the friendly greetings of everyone he met, and particularly by the loving reception of his family at the Maida train station, a group that included his mother; his married sister, Maria, and her husband, Francesco Cristiani (holding their infant son, Antonio); and even his father, in his mid-fifties, his reddish hair now turning white. Domenico embraced him tightly within his cape, misty-eyed and strangely sentimental; and later, during a private moment, his father admitted that he had prayed for Gaetano’s safe return during each and every day of his absence. While Gaetano was moved on hearing this, he hoped that his father was not counting on his resettling in Maida and fulfilling some function in the family enterprises. Gaetano intended to return to the United States within a few months, when the milder spring weather melted the frozen mortar and permitted the resumption of stonework outdoors on a full-time basis. He liked his job—and also the three-month hiatus each winter that had permitted him to board trains in Philadelphia and wander about the country.

  During the previous winter, that of 1893–1894, he had spent six weeks in New Orleans. The winter before, he had gone by train to California, then traveled by stagecoach from Santa Ana to the Mexican border. Having learned to speak and read English, Gaetano was a knowing and communicative traveler; and despite the expense of such trips (and having to pay off almost three hundred dollars in gambling debts to Bosio), he still had a few hundred dollars left in a safety deposit box in Philadelphia after he had advanced the payment for his passage back to Italy. Had he been more frugal he could have saved five times that amount. But Gaetano spent money nearly as fast as he made it, living for the day, unconcerned about tomorrow. During his fourth year in America, before turning twenty-one, he vacated Lobianco’s boardinghouse for a small, expensive apartment in Philadelphia, which he shared with a fellow worker of his own age, Carlo Donato, who commuted with him each workday to Ambler. Donato came from a village just south of Maida called Jacurso. Each evening after returning to Philadelphia, and all day on Sundays, Donato earned extra money working as a waiter in an Italian restaurant, where Gaetano went to eat.

  Gaetano had no idea what he would do after Dr. Mattison’s Gothic community was completed. He had been told by his mentor, Mr. Maniscalco, who was almost as casual and unconcerned about making plans as Gaetano, that there would always be plenty of work for stone artisans in the eastern area of the United States. Maniscalco had predicted that the current building boom in the region would last for decades, and Gaetano had readily agreed. He had noticed several busy construction sites from his train window during his excursions—signs of a prospering economy in a growing nation to which he would soon apply for citizenship, a young country that differed greatly from what he saw when he returned to Italy in late 1894.

  Disembarking from the steamship in Naples for a three-day stopover before boarding the train to Maida, Gaetano observed that little had changed in the city since he had been there in 1888. It seemed as boisterous, dirty, and overcrowded as ever. Nothing new was being built; nothing old was being renovated. Beggars were everywhere. Herds of goats clopped through the teeming streets among the carriage drivers and pedestrians, and between tight rows of beige stone houses that fanned out from the harbor up toward Mount Vesuvius. Herdsmen sometimes escorted goats into the ground-floor apartments of customers wanting milk, and even up the steps to top-floor apartments, leaving behind a trail of animal droppings that no one seemed to mind.

  On the Piazza del Plebiscito was the royal palace, its throne long vacant; and behind the equestrian statues of two Bourbon kings was the Church of Saint Francis of Paola, its dome eroding and parts of its columns cracking and chipped. Within the arcade of the church, and within other sheltered spaces throughout the city, stood itinerant cooks, their pots steaming with macaroni, fish, and sausages; and mingling around them were vendors hawking a variety of items—gloves, hats, rosary beads, trays of cigar ends (retrieved from gutters), stolen jewelry, and ornaments made of lava. As usual, the citizenry kept an eye on the volcano as a guide to forecasting the weather. On the day of Gaetano’s arrival, the crater was concealed behind a thick layer of clouds, and the wind was coming from the south, indicating wet weather was due. By noon, the city was drenched in rain.

  The newspaper headlines were no less grim than they had been six years before. Italy was still engaged in colonial wars in East Africa. Gaetano had seen several Italian soldiers in the streets of Naples, a few wearing bandages and walking with the aid of canes. The government in Rome had kept up its campaign against the anarchists and radical Socialists. Nearly all of the radicals Gaetano had known in Naples were now in the United States, lamenting from afar Italy’s decision to disband the Socialist Party and to institute strict new laws against anarchists. But not even the most ardent of antianarchist legislators in Rome believed that the life of King Umberto I, son of the Risorgimento king, Victor Emmanuel II, would ever be endangered by an anarchist assassin.

  After three days in Naples, Gaetano checked out of his hotel, took a carriage to the east end of the city, and boarded a southbound train to Maida, having sent a telegram to his parents the previous night, announcing his presence in Italy and his scheduled time of arrival in the village. It was a tedious journey: the train stopped at almost every town along the route, allowing passengers to use the toilets in the stations (there were none on the train), and some second-class travelers in the rear car to walk the baby goats and lambs they had brought on board. Gaetano sat alone in one of the first-class smoking compartments, which were in the front of the train behind the compartments reserved for women.

  On this day the train had left Naples with no women aboard, and only five men in addition to Gaetano in the front section. Unlike the gregarious young travelers with whom he had drunk wine and sung songs while crossing the ocean, his rail companions were middle-aged seignorial figures in dark suits and hats who exchanged few words even when standing together in the aisle. Each sat alone within a glass-paneled enclosure, surrounded by empty seats, reading a newspaper or a book, smoking a cigarette or small cigar, and occasionally glancing out at the passing countryside with a facial expression that was pensive, even sad. Gaetano thought they might be Neapolitan landowners en route to survey the fallow fields of their plantations, anticipating the dismal financial reports they would soon be receiving from their foremen in the deep south.

  The land did indeed seem barren, no matter where Gaetano looked out from the train as it slowly chugged and choked its way through the black smoke of its locomotive, following tracks that at times skimmed along the edge of the Tyrrhenian Sea, then swerved inland and climbed high on viaduct bridges into promontory tunnels, rumbling and swaying in the darkness for several moments before emerging again in the daylight and down again toward the bleak coastline. Only rarely did Gaetano see a fishing boat in the sea. Even the once ubiquitous scavenger birds seemed to have disappeared. But the mountains inland, to Gaetano’s left, never disappeared—they remained framed within the rows of windows during the entire trip, dominating the skyline with their snowcapped peaks, fir-forested hills, remains of ruined castles and ancient watchtowers, and cliffside villages that were invariably lopsided. Gaetano knew that many of these villages had been struck by earthquakes decades before, centuries before; but only now, with the perspective that a long absence from home can bring to a returning native, could he contemplate with fresh clarity this mutilated and precipitous land, and acknowledge the adaptability required of those who chose to remain here.

  As the train pulled slowly in and out of stations and brought him closer and closer to Maida, Gaetano saw gathered along the platforms many people he thought he had seen before; but he could recognize none of them. Most of those in the waiting crowds were young men of his own age, often accompanied by older men and women who stood next to luggage and sometimes dabbed their e
yes with handkerchiefs. The young men did not board Gaetano’s train. They were waiting on the opposite side of the platform for trains heading north toward Naples. From the quantity and size of their luggage Gaetano guessed that the young men were going away for a long time, perhaps via a steamship to America, and that the older folks were relatives and friends who had come to say good-bye.

  At the station in Amantea, about an hour upcoast from Maida, Gaetano saw a young couple who gave the impression of being newly married. The woman was very pretty and looked barely twenty, and she carried a bouquet of flowers tied with a long white ribbon that trailed against her maroon skirt and brown fringed shawl. She stood in the center of the platform, opposite Gaetano’s window, and as he leaned forward and studied her under the stanchioned light she seemed to be in a mood of much gaiety and anticipation. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were bright; and while she appeared attentive to what was being said between her boutonniered young companion and the elders who stood next to him, she also glanced down the tracks constantly in the direction from which the train would come.

  Gaetano was affected by her spirit, and he imagined himself one day marrying such a woman and embarking on a new adventure. He had never had a close relationship with a woman of his age during his earlier years in Maida, or since he had been away. Despite his travels in America, and the widening circle of people he had befriended since taking the apartment in Philadelphia, he had met few eligible women. America was open-armed, but its daughters were invariably off-limits. There was the social barrier that existed between non-Italian women and such workers as himself, as well as the fact that practically all the young Italian women he was aware of in America were already married or engaged. He had therefore been very pleased and receptive when his roommate, Carlo Donato, had suggested that Gaetano look up a certain cousin of his who lived with her family in the valley of Maida. Donato described her as being very attractive but a bit stubborn, and said that her name was Marian Rocchino. Donato also composed a letter of introduction and gave it to Gaetano to deliver to her home—which Gaetano did five days after he had arrived in Maida.

  Having borrowed one of his father’s horses, but without informing him of the purpose, Gaetano followed Carlo Donato’s directions to the Rocchino farm three miles downhill, only to discover that no one was home, and learn from a neighbor that Marian’s parents were away for a few days in the provincial capital of Catanzaro, but that she and her youngest brother were staying at the home of family friends in the village, down the road from the Talese family compound.

  It was siesta time when Gaetano located the house, and so without knocking he left the letter with a note of his own, saying that if Marian was agreeable to meeting him he would be standing in front of the balcony of her friends’ house at seven o’clock that evening.

  When he returned and saw her waiting for him, he at first thought he was again seeing the young woman from the train station in Amantea.

  Gaetano was in bed for several days from the knife wound, feverish, dizzy, and scarred. Ippolita cried when her son was carried home by the police, but after the doctor had reassured her of his complete recovery, she devoted herself to his daily care, changing the bandages as the doctor had instructed. His father did not visit his bedroom after the first day. Domenico regarded the situation as scandalous and could not help wondering whether Gaetano, or the woman he had been talking to, had not somehow provoked the violence that had transpired.

  Domenico knew the Rocchino family slightly, and understood them to be simple but honorable people, although he knew nothing of Marian. He had spoken to her father, who was more remorseful than angry, acknowledging that the incident might impede his daughter’s chances of marrying anyone in the village. But Marian seemed concerned only with Gaetano’s recovery. Against her parents’ advice, she insisted on visiting him every day. She was as her cousin in Philadelphia had described her to Gaetano—stubborn but very attractive. Gaetano liked her more each time he saw her.

  When his bandages had been removed and he was feeling better, he began to take walks with Marian in public. This was in February 1895, some weeks after the stabbing, and nearly everyone in the square nodded and smiled as the young couple passed. Their budding romance was obvious to all in Maida, and Gaetano was very pleased and proud as he escorted his petite twenty-year-old innamorata home each day before twilight, his three-inch scar plainly visible to all since he had decided not to wear his customary wide-brimmed fedora—partly to avoid scraping the hat’s inner edge against his wound, and partly to flaunt the wound in defiance of his attacker. While he hoped there would never be another confrontation, there was a new boldness, an intensity and watchfulness, about Gaetano. When he found himself face to face with other young men on the road, and properly returned their acknowledgments, he made it a point to look directly and probingly into their eyes. He also carried a heavy malacca walking stick, which, if necessary, he intended to use as a weapon.

  At the end of the month, Gaetano proposed marriage to Marian. She was at first reluctant, suggesting that they should wait until they had known one another longer. But his enthusiasm and romanticism about marriage were persuasive; and soon it was she, more than he, who was pressing their families to complete their prenuptial discussions, which involved everything from the dowry to the church date. It was now a foregone conclusion on her part that the marriage itself was inevitable, and was not a subject for debate by the families of either party.

  Of all the relatives, Gaetano’s father was, surprisingly, the most positive about the union. Domenico saw the marriage as perhaps a solution to the mysterious waywardness of his oldest son; and so he demonstrated uncommon warmth toward his future daughter-in-law and ingratiated himself as well with her parents and brothers. He also promised as one of his wedding gifts to the couple the deed to the two-story house located next to his own. Privately he hoped that Gaetano would show his gratitude by withdrawing from America and assume, at long last, a modicum of filial responsibility.

  At this time Domenico had no idea, nor should he have had one, given Gaetano’s persistent vagueness, that his son was committed to living in America. Unbeknownst to anyone in the family, Gaetano had received a wire at the post office from Mr. Maniscalco extending his time in Italy, because of the circumstances of his injury, but he expected Gaetano back on the job no later than the end of July. Gaetano had also received a letter from Marian’s cousin Carlo Donato, with the pleasant news that he had accepted a high-paying foreman’s position with a construction company in Delaware, and as a result he would be leaving the Philadelphia apartment entirely to Gaetano for the foreseeable future. Without consulting Marian, Gaetano determined that this would be their future home. He booked their passage on a ship that would get them from Naples to the United States within the time limit that Maniscalco had imposed; and in so doing, Gaetano spent most of what was left of his savings on the sea voyage that he saw as their honeymoon.

  Two days after the wedding, held in early July 1895 in the Maida church where his own parents had been married, Gaetano informed his wife of the travel plans. She responded in a tearful manner that in no way diluted her decisiveness that she was not going. She argued that, in accepting Domenico’s wedding gift of a house, her husband had allowed her to assume this would be their home; much as she loved him, she reminded him, she was acutely hydrophobic and could never travel anywhere by sea. She also recounted certain sad tales she had heard about the living conditions of immigrants’ wives in America, and nothing Gaetano could say or do in the days ahead could dissuade her. He finally understood what her cousin in Philadelphia had meant when he said that Marian had a mind of her own.

  She was fundamentally a woman of the provinces, a woman who would always be wed more to her village than to a husband who was abroad. And so after three more days of futile effort, Gaetano angrily left Maida without her, sailing from Naples on choppy waters under an ashen sky. Wearing a new suit that had been a wedding present, and his favor
ite fedora over his now healed wound, and holding on to the brass rail within a glass-enclosed stateroom of the second deck, Gaetano stared at the waves and watched his native land recede in the distance. As far as he was concerned, the marriage was over.

  For five months, the couple did not communicate. Then one Saturday evening after Gaetano had returned to the Philadelphia apartment from Ambler, a messenger arrived to say that an important letter from Italy awaited him at the home of a Philadelphia mortician named Francesco Donato, a distant relative of Carlo, his former roommate. Gaetano knew of the mortician but had never met him, and from the worrisome look on the young messenger’s face, he assumed that the letter would inform him of the grave illness or death of a member of the family. Gaetano had never given anyone in Maida his new address in Philadelphia, and he thanked the messenger for the efforts taken in locating him. Then, after donning a dark suit and following the messenger’s directions to the funeral parlor on the other side of South Philadelphia’s Italian section, Gaetano found himself standing on the white marble floor of a reception room, surrounded by flowers and empty open caskets, shaking hands with Mr. Donato, a portly, balding man wearing a black suit and a white carnation, and large diamond rings on both pinkies. There was a jovial expression on his round face.

  “I have good news,” Mr. Donato said. “Soon you will become a father.”

  He handed the letter in the opened envelope to Gaetano and smiled while Gaetano read it, anticipating a joyful reaction. But Gaetano’s long face and somber dark eyes remained unchanged. Then he put his wife’s letter back into the envelope and, remaining silent, handed it to Mr. Donato, who frowned with disappointment. It then occurred to Mr. Donato that perhaps Gaetano was unable to read; and so he asked softly, “Would you like me to read it to you?”