Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  At the Gare de Lyon, Antonio stood for ten hours with several hundred people on a long, slow-moving line, unsure of his destination. No rifle bullets or cannons had yet been fired upon the French nation, and he remained hopeful that a last-minute solution by world leaders could bring the belligerent governments to the peace table.

  Italy had declared its neutrality in this conflict, but most of the Italians Antonio overheard talking in the crowd favored the French, British, and Russians over the Germans and Austrians. Nearly everyone was especially hostile toward the latter. Austria was Italy’s hereditary enemy. Italian unity had been achieved only after three wars with Austria, and many believed that another war with Austria was necessary to complete the goals of the Risorgimento, to wrest from the hated Hapsburg kingdom certain Italian-speaking seaports and alpine villages to the north and east of Venice. Antonio voiced no opinion in these discussions, which were conducted largely by older men who were natives of northern Italy. He merely listened and inched his way up in the line. When he finally got to the ticket window he impulsively gave his destination as Turin. Of all the major cities of northern Italy, Turin was the closest to the border of the French nation that he was reluctant to leave.

  He rode all night in a noisy and crowded train, standing most of the way. By midmorning he had arrived in Turin. After checking into a small hotel near the railroad terminal, he wired his family in Maida that he had departed safely from Paris. Then he went out to a square and stood among the throngs of bystanders waiting for the latest bulletins to be posted on the billboards, and for freshly printed editions of newspapers to be delivered by cyclists to the kiosks in front of the terminal. Many speeches were being made, by both antimilitarists and interventionists, and there was loud cheering and booing as some people began singing the “Internationale.” Police carrying rifles and clubs separated the demonstrators who were shouting and swearing at one another. When demonstrators began to throw fruit and even bottles at the speakers, the police fired shots in the air and restored order. Antonio stood among the crowds watching quietly at the bar of an outdoor café, remaining as far as possible from those making speeches and throwing things.

  He spent all of August in Turin, still believing there was a chance that the mobilizing nations were bluffing one another and might yet back away from plunging Europe into a massive and bloody showdown. But each day the headlines announced the escalation of threats and the hostile declarations of increasing numbers of nations. As the German army marched into Belgium, presumably headed toward Paris, Britain joined France in the war on Germany. Montenegro and Serbia declared war on Germany. Days later, as troops from Britain crossed the English Channel to ally themselves with France, both nations declared war on Austria. In late August, Japan declared war on Germany and Austria, and Austria declared war on Belgium. The Germans by this time had entered Brussels. The German warships Breslau and Goeben, allowed to pass through the Dardanelles by the friendly Turks, would soon be in a position to bombard Russian coastal cities. Russia would later declare war on Turkey, as would France and Britain. In the first weeks of September, the German army, having advanced through Belgium, became militarily engaged with the French in what would be the first battle of the Marne. Antonio conceded that he had no choice but to make his way back to Maida.

  With newspapers tucked under his arm, he went to his hotel to pay his bill and pack his belongings. There the concierge handed him a telegram. It was from his father:

  “Come home quickly. Uncle Gaetano is dead.”

  22.

  Young Joseph Talese did not understand his father’s death any more than he had understood his father’s life. His father had died suddenly and inexplicably, in the bedroom of his home in Maida, in the middle of a sunny afternoon, on the first day of September 1914.

  Joseph had been out of the house at the time, working at Cristiani’s tailor shop, to which he had gone directly from school. He had been happy all day, reveling in his father’s rare presence in Maida. Gaetano had been away in Naples for more than a month and had returned unexpectedly the night before. When Francesco Cristiani had abruptly decided to close the shop early, shortly before five p.m., for reasons unexplained, Joseph hastened home with the hope of having some time alone with his father before the evening meal. But once he had run through the square and down the curved road toward the family compound, and had climbed the staircase on the side of his house and entered the living room, he knew immediately that something was wrong.

  The room was crowded with people, some of whom he did not know, and others, including his mother’s Rocchino relatives, whom he knew slightly but had never seen in the house before. They sat in small groups within the bare walls shaking their heads and looking at the ceramic floor. Whatever was being said was softly spoken. Joseph’s grandmother Ippolita stood by herself facing a window that overlooked the cliff and the distant shoreline. Her usually braided white hair seemed longer, and its wispy ends were visible in the light streaming through the window. Hearing the door close, his grandmother turned toward Joseph, but she did not seem to recognize him. One of his mother’s aunts reached out to him and smiled encouragingly. He ignored her and hurried toward his parents’ bedroom, confused, looking for his mother.

  When he entered the doorway, Joseph saw a priest standing at the foot of his parents’ bed, his arm consolingly around the slim shoulders of Joseph’s aunt Maria. Joseph looked toward her for some explanation, but she remained quiet and still, her face shadowed within her black mantilla. Sitting at the near side of the bed, staring across it, was his mother, wearing the same pretty maroon dress and yellow shawl she had worn that morning at breakfast. She had cheerfully prepared breakfast for Joseph alone, after his brother Sebastian had left for the farm. Gaetano had still been in bed, exhausted after the long train ride from Naples. The suitcase he had brought with him was still downstairs, locked where he had left it in a corner of the carriage shed, on top of the big wooden trunk he always carried to America and back.

  Joseph’s mother had been in a pleasant mood for days prior to his father’s return from Naples, spiritedly reminding Joseph and the other children of their father’s impending arrival while she implored them to be tidy. She filled the house with fresh flowers, and polished and repolished the silverware at the head of the table where Gaetano had last sat weeks before, coughing and wheezing, his face thinner and paler than it was in the framed photograph on Marian’s bureau.

  Now as Joseph stood next to the bed and touched his mother’s shoulder, Marian turned around to face him; he noticed that she held a handkerchief over part of her face and that a reddish welt rose puffily on her right temple. Her yellow shawl had fallen from her shoulders, and as she continued to look at him she tightened her lips. Trembling, Joseph turned away from her and looked at the bulky white covers of the bed; the figure stretched out underneath seemed huge. Then Joseph felt his grandfather Domenico’s hand on his arm, gently but firmly pulling him away; and after guiding him out of the bedroom into a corner of the crowded living room, his grandfather said in a kindly voice: “Joseph, your father is dead.”

  Not that afternoon but much later, years later, Joseph would hear from one of his mother’s sisters that his father had not come directly home to Maida after his final overseas crossing in the summer of 1913; he had gone instead to a hospital near Naples, where he received the first in a series of new medical treatments that would be repeated during subsequent visits in the final months of his life. On the afternoon of his death he had been seized by a delirious fit, and had angrily swung out his hand and hit Marian.

  Joseph also learned that his father’s last years in America had been unhappy ones. A financial recession had interrupted America’s building boom despite optimistic forecasts, and Gaetano had been irregularly employed. He had also gotten himself into debt through gambling, and in order to meet his expenses and support his family in Italy, he had begun working a double shift in the Keasbey & Mattison asbestos factory. Soon he had
difficulty breathing; his ailment, first diagnosed as a mild case of bronchopneumonia, had continued to worsen.

  Marian was not aware of the extent of her husband’s illness after he returned from America in 1913. On the afternoon of his death, as was her custom, she was paying a visit to her father’s farmhouse with her three youngest children. When Gaetano woke up in the early afternoon, feverish and shaking, he began to call to his wife. When she did not come, he began to call louder, berating her for being away. A neighbor who was passing in front of the wall of the compound, and who paused to listen, thought she was hearing a domestic quarrel and continued on her way. Later in the afternoon, when Marian returned home, she found her husband gasping for breath, the pillows and blankets tossed out on the stone floor while he twisted and turned on the damp sheets in a cold sweat. As Marian tried to comfort him, he became even more uncontrollably irrational, blaming her for not being with him; and then one wildly flailing arm struck her, causing the welt on her temple. Within moments he had become unconscious, and then suddenly he was dead.

  Marian did not attend the funeral. Whether it was to conceal the welt, or whether it was her own resentment at his striking her, Joseph would never know. Although his mother did begin to wear black in the house, and a long black veil to the memorial services that his grandfather Domenico arranged to have said in church every Sunday evening for many weeks after the funeral, Joseph never saw his mother shed a tear, or carry flowers to the cemetery, or complain of missing his father. Many of her late husband’s relatives were bewildered and offended by her behavior, and even blamed her for being absent during the final hours of his life. This information was passed on to Joseph years after the funeral by his mother’s younger sister, his aunt Concetta Rocchino, who also told him about his father’s gambling problems in America. While Concetta did not intend to demean the memory of Joseph’s father, she was eager to defend her sister against the criticism that she assumed was widely circulated on the Talese side of the family.

  Concetta insisted to Joseph that his mother mourned his father in her own private way, and was very uncomfortable with the public display of grief that had been carried out by Domenico and his dutiful daughter, Maria. This pair of religious zealots, Concetta suggested to Joseph, tried with their use of church bells and burning incense to endow the deceased with a spiritual essence that Gaetano during his lifetime neither had nor wanted. In an attempt to prolong the memory of this wandering man whose family did not know him sufficiently to have much memory of him, Domenico and Maria had also hired professional mourners to wail each night at the grave site and to sprinkle dirt each Friday night with the fiori da morti, crushed geranium leaves; and at the weekly Sunday services in church, which even Gaetano’s nonbelieving mother Ippolita felt compelled to attend, Domenico and Maria led the family clan through endless litanies and even recited death chants composed during the Dark Ages. Father and daughter both fasted every weekend in the autumn of 1914 and on into the following year, and they kept the interior of their homes glowing dimly with burning candles instead of gaslamps, and decked the outside of their doorways and windows with black bunting and ribbons that remained there until, years later, faded and worn, they were carried away by the wind.

  Concetta reminded Joseph that at the funeral his aunt Maria had become Gaetano’s self-appointed “widow” after Marian had failed to attend. Maria had accompanied the priests behind the casket, had not combed her hair in several days, conforming to ancient custom, and had not allowed cooking in her home for many weeks. Relatives and friends had brought food during this time to the Cristiani household as well as to Joseph’s mother, Concetta recounted, adding that these kind gestures had not gone unnoticed by village gossips and that the awareness of much unpleasant talk exacerbated the awkward situation between Joseph’s mother and Maria. It was difficult for Marian to represent herself in public on the day of the funeral as a bereaving wife, Concetta said, particularly while she still bore the sting of her husband’s hostile farewell. It was no wonder, Concetta concluded, that Marian soon began to avoid Sunday church services in favor of spending weekends with her three youngest children at her family’s farmhouse in the valley. There she was surrounded by relatives and friends who ignored the time-honored practices of mourning and allowed her to retain some of the independence she had become accustomed to during her nearly twenty years as a white widow.

  What Joseph most remembered of his mother’s first days of true widowhood was that, despite being withdrawn and virtually speechless, she was extremely active and efficient around the house, accomplishing tasks during September—which had begun with her husband’s death—that she usually delayed doing each year until October or November. She preserved great amounts of food in jars for the winter; mended and altered the younger children’s winter clothing; took stock of the leftover supply of logs and charcoal and dispatched Sebastian to get what was needed for the frosty weather ahead. She also purchased a new set of wheels for the carriage, anticipating the additional use she would be making of it: one month after the funeral she began dividing her time almost equally between her marital home in town and her girlhood home in the valley.

  It was her oldest son’s responsibility to drive her and the younger children back and forth at prearranged times, usually during the midday siesta, when Sebastian could spare an hour or two from his job as the junior foreman on Domenico’s farm. It was also Sebastian’s duty to look after the village house during his mother’s absence. Sebastian Talese, a strapping boy of fifteen, more than four years older than Joseph, was now the nominal head of the family.

  Soon Sebastian was occupying his father’s chair at the dinner table, and becoming more active in disciplining the younger children. He would have tried disciplining Joseph, too, but within a week of Gaetano’s death Joseph had more or less moved out of the house, thanks to the efforts of Antonio, who had returned to Maida and convinced Marian that since Joseph was attending school and working in the tailor shop each day, his daily routine would be best maintained if he ate and slept at the Cristianis’, and went back and forth with them each morning and night between the town square and the family compound. Joseph would be only three doors away from his mother’s home in the compound, and would be within easy reach whenever she wanted him under her own roof.

  Disregarding her strained relations with Maria Cristiani, Joseph’s mother complied; it was as if she were honoring her husband’s wishes expressed in the previous year, his desire to break up the family and take Joseph with him to America. Now that this was impossible, Marian seemed to be doing the next best thing—releasing Joseph to the care of her late husband’s sister, and allowing the boy to begin living a more separate life. She had already sensed increased independence in his nature and foresaw much conflict in the near future between Joseph and Sebastian—and recurring scenes of the sort she had witnessed two nights after the funeral.

  The younger children were in bed at the time, and her older sons had been helping her—polishing the floors, beating the rugs outside with willow swatters, and carrying a heavy chest that had been filled with her husband’s things down to the carriage shed, to be stored in a corner near his padlocked steamer trunk and the unpacked suitcase he had carried home from Naples.

  “I think we should take your father’s clothes from the suitcase and trunk and deliver them to Cristiani’s shop,” she had said. Sebastian immediately reached for the keys that were hung on a nail and proceeded to look for the one that would open the trunk.

  “Put those keys away,” said Joseph in a quiet voice that surprised his mother but that Sebastian seemed not to hear.

  “Put those keys away!” Joseph said again, louder. “I don’t want you to touch those clothes!”

  “Joseph!” his mother said. “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t want those clothes given away,” Joseph repeated. “I want to keep them.”

  It was a strange thing to say. Nobody in Maida ever kept the clothes of a deceased f
amily member. It was considered unseemly, morbid, surely an inducement for bad luck.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Sebastian demanded, still not looking at his younger brother, but having now opened the trunk for his mother’s inspection. Without replying, Joseph turned around and ran up the staircase. A few minutes later he came down, brandishing in his right hand a heavy poker he had taken from the kitchen fireplace, and quickly he headed toward the crouched figure of Sebastian who was pulling clothes from his father’s trunk. Sebastian fell back as he saw Joseph coming toward him, and he watched as Joseph stood over him, waving the rod menacingly in front of his face.

  “Stop, Joseph!” their mother protested. “Stop!”

  “I said I didn’t want these clothes touched,” Joseph said, looking down at his brother. “Now give me those keys you’re holding, and get away from those clothes.” Sebastian dropped the keys on the floor and slid backward, never taking his eyes off the poker. “And now you go upstairs,” Joseph ordered. Sebastian looked at his mother momentarily, then back at Joseph, bewildered by the crazed manner his younger brother had suddenly manifested. Then he got to his feet and walked upstairs.

  “Joseph,” his mother said quietly, walking toward him. “What is the matter with you?”

  Joseph stood silently for a few moments, lowering the poker, and then said: “I don’t want the clothes to go to Cristiani’s. I don’t want them to be given away for other people to wear. I want to keep them.”

  Without waiting for her response, he put his father’s suits, both summer and winter ones, back into the trunk and lowered the lid. He also refastened the suitcase that Sebastian had opened.

  He locked the trunk and the suitcase, and then placed the keys in his pocket.

  23.