by Lee Gutkind
“What would you like to take lessons on—accordion or guitar?” my mother asked in the fall of ’65. We stood in the den where a large black-and-white Magnavox flickered, where I’d bang out rhythmic noise on a toy Mickey Mouse guitar, no doubt imitating some group I’d seen on American Bandstand, or the soundtrack of the Beatles’ weekly cartoon. I knew this was an important moment. I could play accordion—“like Dad,” she said, in case I’d missed the point, or I could learn guitar, if I wanted. Either way, I could decide. I’d never before thought of my father as someone I should emulate, but now my mother invoked him as if his influence would sway me, the only time in my whole life that I recall her doing so. She must truly have wanted me, this once, to follow in his footsteps. As the daughter of Polish immigrants who’d divorced during her childhood, and always anxious to please her mother, Betty had her own fond hopes: with lessons, I’d play even better than Dad, fill the house with polka music, and someday headline before her mother at the Polish social club in Hempstead.
But, partly due to Betty’s influence, my choice was already made. My mother had taught me to read before I’d even started school, praised my drawings in colored pencil, maintained I’d one day go to college, and sent the message overall that I was meant for better things—the belief of all blue-collar parents ambitious on their child’s behalf. Placed in a “home for girls” for some time after the divorce, Betty, a good student, didn’t progress beyond eighth grade, while my father, a dyslexic long before the term was coined, struggled through grammar school until almost sixteen. His old autograph book reflects the indifference of his teachers: generic entries—“Best Wishes,” “Success”—and Mr. Gottlieb’s proverb, “Follow the Golden Rule not the Rule of Gold.” No classmates seem to have signed, though his mother and Margaret did: “When you and I are far apart/Whisper my name to the Sa-ca-red Heart”; and “Love many trust few/Always paddle your own canoe.” School wasn’t the place for Carmine, but his dad had taught him to solder. After working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard before and after the war, Carmine became a plumber in the early 1950s, taking a job with an Army buddy who knew a licensed silver brazier could easily turn his expertise to this new calling.
There were unspoken messages, too, that made me feel less Italian. Growing up in the 1960s, I almost never saw Dad’s family due to Betty’s feuds over real or imagined slights. The worst meal she’d ever had, she said, was “alya oo”—Southern Italian dialect for spaghetti con aglio e olio—a dinner she couldn’t even choke down on that night now long ago when Carmine had first brought her home to meet his mother. Why couldn’t the women get along? Why did she fight with his sisters, too? Whatever the case, every Thursday, my father enjoyed his one night out, time he invariably spent visiting a brother or sister, four of whom had followed the same postwar migration to Long Island, but they did not reciprocate, and we three spent holidays alone, our large house oppressive in its emptiness.
In part, depression gripped my mother, who saw rejection everywhere, even as she rationalized that others were merely jealous—of her well-kept yard, her figure, her husband’s job, her son—but she was shaped, too, by the prejudices of a generation whose stereotypes of Italians hadn’t yet relaxed their hold. That generation used racial and national epithets quite freely—my mother was proud of her “polack” background, my father sipped his “guinea red”—failing to make the leap that distinctions in ethnic origin paled beside the forces that claimed and homogenized their cultures. And so, my mother declared, I took after her side of the family, pointing out features she said were Polish, complaining vaguely of Carmine’s quirks, little by little sending the message that although my father was Italian, for some reason I shouldn’t think that I was, too.
In fact, I wasn’t. I was adopted, a fact I didn’t learn for years, but when I did, it explained a lot, including why we’d moved so often. Eventually, neighbors would notice that I didn’t resemble Carmine and conclude I was too young to be this aging couple’s son. Of course, Dad’s family knew the truth at a time when most adoptive parents sustained the pretense that their children were biologically their own. It wasn’t easy for Betty to drop the guard she kept up every day against the inquisition of neighbors or the chance remarks of strangers.
“I want to learn guitar,” I answered. Betty asked if I was sure. And I turned my back, in a small way, on my father and an era.
Throughout his life, for long periods, Dad set the accordion aside, either because he was feeling blue or because he was just too busy. Laid off from his longtime job, an older worker without a pension, he worked (usually as a plumber) till the age of seventy-one. Years earlier, he’d watched as arthritis crippled his wife, and then he lost her to lung cancer a month after I went away to college. He sold our last house for too little, lived in various apartments, and never dated during the twenty-three years following her death. Although irascible at times, he saw the world with verve and humor; he was impatient with pretense and unfailingly self-deprecating. “You know, I’m dumb,” he’d often say as if simply stating a fact, leaving me to point out all the ways he proved himself perceptive. Still, he struggled so much to read that he could hardly stay informed, a deficit that my own strengths only emphasized more keenly. He never said anything but must have wondered whether I’d have shared this weakness were I the birth son he and Betty could not have.
The third, and last, new song that I remember my father learning was a standard revived by the eight-track boom of the early ’70s. By then, we lived in Brentwood, a blue-collar suburb near the South Shore, a step or more below Smithtown in property value and prestige. In June ’67, Betty had moved us into a split-level ranch in a neighborhood where she’d already started to make friends. Things didn’t work out, of course, and she soon regretted her decision. Our house, previously owned, was never right, or clean enough, as the realization hit that moving again was beyond our means. But we made the best of it. Soon, this home, too, was filled with music. One Sunday, my father, on a whim, connected his workshed record player to an outside speaker that he’d hung above the pool. Glenn Miller’s woodwinds, tortured and tinny, suddenly floated over the yard as my mother looked up from her swim and Carmine laughed.
My father was ready for eight-track tapes and, with his brother’s help, would have them. Uncle Joe, on disability from New York Telephone, had opened the J & B Discount Center in Farmingdale, Long Island. In toupee and leisure suits, he’d bounced back from his engagement to a seventeen-year-old girl whose father had threatened him with violence. His stock ranged widely, even wildly, from knock-off suits and cheap electronics to second-hand musical instruments, fad gadgets, and stationery supplies. He acquired, too, an inventory of bootleg eight-track tapes whose generic labels marked them as evidence of copyright infringement. A block from Uncle Mike’s, the store served best as the brothers’ hangout until Joe’s reckless spending drove the business into the ground. In the meantime, he helped Carmine hook up an eight-track deck into his beat-up ’63 Ford Fairlane.
Suddenly, Dad had a tape deck that played music I’d never heard—Al Martino, Jerry Vale, the latecomers of Italian crooners. Born a generation after Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack, they owed much of their success to exposure on TV. But how long would the old tricks work? “Spanish Eyes,” the signature song of the man born Alfred Cini, turns a Neapolitan ballad into a paean to Latin beauty, two stock Mediterranean types sharing a tearful “adios”; Martino’s overdramatic singing, however, drowns the song in schmaltz. Also revealing is Jerry Vale’s bitter anecdote of having failed to appear on Dean Martin’s TV show. Having traveled across country only to be cut at the last minute, the former Genaro Vitaliano felt stung, humiliated, but he found no paisan in the star who informed him casually that guests were often cut when shows ran overtime. However justified, given the fee he’d forfeited, Vale’s long-cherished grudge is one nursed by a secondary talent facing the privilege and caprice that greater talents believe their due. Even my dad considered Martino and Vale co
rny, though he was unable to articulate what he intuited. He loved the idols of his youth who’d defined the Big Bands’ heyday; these would-be successors could never match their stature.
The tape we played most often when we ran errands for my mother, or when my father taxied me home from weekly lessons on guitar, had nothing to do with Italian music or the tunes my father played. It was, instead, another bootleg, the Mills Brothers’ greatest hits, which clacked so loudly when it switched programs that my father and I would jump. The four original Mills brothers, black men born in Piqua, Ohio, had first gained fame in the early ’30s through their exceptional vocal skills. Not only could they harmonize but their optimistic demeanor was perfectly suited to a nation facing the worst of the Depression. During World War II, they shot back to the top of the charts with “Paper Doll,” a number one hit that eventually sold six million copies. The song’s sheet music was popular, too, and underwent several printings in those years before an upright piano vanished from most households.
The Mills Brothers could bring to life even the most questionable material: their versions of “Opus 1,” “Glow Worm,” “Cab Driver,” and “Mañana” are surprisingly appealing despite the low quality of the songs. Carmine, long indifferent to the Beatles, was glad we were finding common ground, that I’d stuck with playing guitar and now was even arranging standards. I didn’t let on how much my lessons had come to bore me by that time or that I couldn’t see myself performing the music that he loved.
One day in 1972, a tune still fresh in mind, the garage door banging closed behind him, my father, whistling, beat a path straight to his waiting instrument. I brought the groceries up to Betty, kissed her, then ran downstairs. Dad was back to playing accordion again. A few years earlier he’d acquired a Hohner German-style accordion with twin valves that reduced the challenge of playing bass. Once more in a musical mood, he’d been practicing every night, his right hand searching a single row of ten white buttons. We’d struggled, at times, to collaborate. Our instruments were at odds: a guitar that played the “real” chords, that changed keys as the song required, versus the diatonic accordion with its inherent limitations, to say nothing of Dad’s unorthodox sense of rhythm. But that day, effortlessly, fingers confident and quick, he played a verse from the Mills Brothers song we’d come to most enjoy. The bridge required a change of key and strayed quite far from the recording, but Carmine’s return to the main melody was clear and clean. It was the last song I remember him teaching himself by ear: “Standing on the Corner, Watching All the Girls Go By,” a tune he’d known for years but had never before attempted, the endless sea of songs that filled the world and the airwaves holding possibilities beyond his reach. Only years later would I suspect he’d lived the song in Greenpoint, Brooklyn: a young man with brothers or friends glancing slyly at girls who passed, some nights playing on the stoop to draw them closer. When had the instrument he owned passed from playing Italian songs to the popular music of the Swing and Big Band era? And who would play it when Dad was gone—when his generation had died out? These were questions that I never thought to ask at the time.
Italian organ-grinders had faded from New York in the ’20s—old men in rumpled clothes who wore their contraption on a strap, endlessly rotating the crank that played its predetermined program—and, in a few years, the Italian accordionists, too, would pass away. True, other hands had played the instrument as well—African or Cajun, Irish or Quebecois—and would form their own traditions: kaseko, zydeco, or conjunto. And there would always be revivalists, grandsons and granddaughters of Italia, keepers of photographs on which the ink of forgotten names had faded—those who’d seek out ancestral villages, learn the language, discover the music, perhaps retrieve and try to master that dusty gadget in the attic.
That day he learned the Mills Brothers’ song, I still thought myself Carmine’s birth son. The question “What are you?” hadn’t yet taken on unwelcome implications, causing me to hesitate between the history I’d believed and the uncertainties from which I’d long been sheltered. Not yet cast into doubt about my home or heritage, I was indifferent, like any other self-absorbed American son. Italy was a far-off country, one I’d probably never see, whose inhabitants and ways had hardly touched me. When that inheritance was lost, I didn’t feel differently—not right away, at any rate—but such knowledge lay at least a year or so ahead. For the moment, I knew that I loved my father whose good mood was contagious, and to hear him playing again only confirmed that I’d loved his music, however limited or imperfect, oddly paced, fraught with mistakes. And so, as before and after—when he practiced a new song, or when memory failed in later years—I helped by singing along, leading him through that exacting bridge, back to the verse, my father smiling as he swayed.
Sources Consulted Include:
Berner, Thomas F. (1999). The Brooklyn Navy Yard. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
“The Diatonic Accordion.” Available at http://www.accordionheaven.com
Epstein, Dan. (1999). 20th Century Pop Culture. New York: Quadrillion.
Grudens, Richard. (2000). Jerry Vale: A Singer’s Life. Celebrity Profiles.
Ierardi, Eric J. (1998). Brooklyn in the 1920s. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
Laredo, Joe. (1992). Liner Notes to Al Martino: Capitol Collector’s Series. Capitol Records, Inc.
Laurino, Maria. (2000). Were You Always an Italian? Ancestors and Other Icons of Italian America. New York: Norton.
Malpezzi, Frances M., and William M. Clements. (1992). Italian American Folklore. Little Rock, AR: August House.
Pierce, Max. (1999). “Russ Columbo: Hollywood’s Tragic Crooner.” Available at http://classicimages.com.
Pulling, Sr. Anne Frances. (1999). Babylon by the Sea. Charleston, SC: Arcadia.
Valentine, C. Irving. (1951). The Art of Playing Hohner Diatonic Accordions. New York: M. Hohner.
NED BALBO received the Ernest Sandeen poetry award for his second collection, Lives of the Sleepers. He is the recipient of grants in poetry from the Maryland Arts Council, the Robert Frost Foundation poetry award, and the John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize for “Walt Whitman’s Finches: On Autobiography and Adoption.”
Washington Square
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CAROL BONOMO ALBRIGHT
I heard my mother’s chair scrape the floor. She had moved the stool she habitually sat on closer to my father.
“Your mother has to register as an alien … she has to go to the post office to register,” my father pressed, “… by January first.”
My parents were in our small, neat kitchen, whispering. They sipped their espresso from the robin’s-egg blue demitasse cups. My mother used the little pot with its slender spout that she turned right side up when the water boiled, making the blue and yellow gas-flame minuet to the last droplets of the overflow. The pot’s metal was shiny against the stove’s black burner. My father’s chair backed against the storage closet with the pencil sharpener screwed inside, and where a narrow length of pepperoni always hung.
We lived in a modern apartment building that had been gutted and renovated from an old tenement, south of Washington Square Park. The building was no longer a walk-up but had an elevator and central heat—not a combination kitchen stove-heater with auxiliary gas heaters—tight windows that didn’t rattle with every breeze, a modern layout with an entry hall rather than the railroad flat model with its no-wasted-space efficiency, no privacy, no aesthetic considerations.
Our building, with my mother’s clean kitchen, sat in the middle of an Italian immigrant neighborhood where we shopped for sausage and ate American mashed potatoes. It was a neighborhood that had housed artists in need of cheap housing and local color since the 1930s. Directly north of us was the old “American” enclave with families like the Rensselaers in their brownstones overlooking the park and Eleanor Roosevelt living in a mews off Fifth Avenue. My mother was not insensible to the differences between the neighborhoods. She was highly attuned to the mores o
f each and tried to negotiate an identity somewhere in the middle of the two. Without realizing it, she staked out her identity within this “in-betweenness.”
I overheard my parents as I stood by the bookcase in the living room. Late afternoon light on this warm October day seeped through the large windows, illuminating the paintings of a wind-tossed sailboat and two still lifes. Our baby grand piano stood in the corner, the Sheaffer ink I had spilled earlier in the day on the ruby and blue Kermanshah rug mercifully blended into its medallion pattern. My grandmother, who lived with us, sat by the window, knitting.
My parents’ whispering excited me: my overhearing them meant I would be privy to their hidden adult world. But I was hardly prepared for a revelation about my own grandmother. Their whispering signaled to me that being an alien was not a good thing. The word itself sounded so dark and foreboding with its echo of the Alien and Sedition Acts we had studied in school. The easy association and confusing connection of alien with sedition—like day and night, following each other inevitably—made me shudder.