by Lee Gutkind
An alien? How jarring that word sounded—so un-American. This was the first time it occurred to me that my grandmother might be less American than I was since, to my mind, she was as American as I: she lived in America, had worked in America, paid taxes, obeyed its laws.
I blew my nose. Nana’s crocheted edging on the borders of my handkerchief scratched. My dear sweet grandmother who had taught me to knit and whom, in my hubris, I had tried to teach to write, was now being labeled an alien! As I stood by the bookshelves, I felt shame about that stigma and stared now with sullen distaste at the complete set of Mark Twain’s works. Connecticut Yankee, indeed! I pushed against the book, hoping to blot it out.
All these thoughts, swirling inchoate in my mind, made me feel scared that something terrible would happen to my grandmother if she didn’t register on time. I wanted to hold tight to her even if she was this alien, speaking only Italian, wearing her black dresses and straw hat with the smashed cloth flower perched atop her head at an odd angle to accommodate the wispy, white bun. At the same time, this latest revelation froze me and made me forget how much I enjoyed her long stories in rhyming couplets in her Calabrian dialect, the Easter bread she baked with strips of dough braided over the imbedded hard-boiled eggs, the fried struffuli, the word sounding like a rush of wind blowing from the north, and which my mother referred to as honey balls in front of Americans.
I pulled out the book I had been looking for when I overheard my parents’ whispers, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, bound in brown cloth with gold lettering and decoration. My parents had bought books like this through the mail—whole sets of Dickens in their black and red bindings, Twain in cream and red, and world classics for my brother and me to read. I fingered the gold-edged pages.
Cocooning myself into the overstuffed chair, my back and head rested against one velvety, broad arm and my legs dangled over the other, wobbly and loose from such abuse. I didn’t stop to smooth out my crumpled skirt, but instead bent over the book with its photos of Cellini’s beautiful gold work and sculptures. Cellini experienced no confusion about who he was or how his origins fit into his present life. He had certainty, the comfort of his sculptures, of definite things like these books, printed about an Italian life that made for wholeness. I dropped away from my confusion into his world.
Cellini’s first name, Benvenuto, he wrote, meant “Welcome.” Although we were American, we were also Italian. My parents’ struggle was to feel welcomed as Americans. For me, an American identity wasn’t enough. George Washington’s false teeth and cherry tree and the Puritans and Pilgrims seemed bland compared to Garibaldi’s dashing figure and Dante’s journey from hell to paradise.
I sank down deeper into my chair as the silence enveloped me. On the page the words flowed in front of me about Cellini’s belief that it was “much more honourable to have sprung from an humble origin,” and to have laid “a foundation of honour for my descendants, than to have been descended from a noble lineage.…”
The rattle of the ragman’s cart broke the stillness. Glancing down to the cobblestones below, I saw the Jewish ragman with his gray beard and faded wagon making his weekly trek from the Lower East Side onto our street in Greenwich Village. This day slabs of cardboard, rags, felt, and bits and pieces of stuff, too dirty to know what they were, fell off the wagon. His head pointed down as he maneuvered the cart from behind. Today the wagon was piled so high the ragman couldn’t possibly stop to rest without toppling half its contents. The wagon wobbled and teetered, but the ragman had melded with its wooden handles. He shuffled down the street while Studebakers and buses skirted round him, another alien, I supposed, wandering among these streets and strangers.
My grandmother, who hadn’t heard my parents’ whispers, craned her neck now toward the window, and noticed the ragman too. “I’m glad,” she said, “that no one in the family had to work in a rag factory … they were dirty places.” “Sporca,” she repeated, “dirty.” Her brows knit together like the yarn on her needles. Leaning against the window sill, she stood up, her corseted figure unbending from just below her bosom to the top of her thighs, her thick stockings taut and smooth on her thin legs. She slipped the knitting into her basket and readied herself to do an errand, her black-heeled oxfords moving quietly across the rug. She was still in her familiar world, her daughter in the kitchen, her granddaughter at her side where she could reflect that her family lived better lives than she had.
My mother called me to peel and cook the potatoes for supper. I stopped reading about Cellini’s parents’ courtship—how his father “soon became sensible to the charms of Lisabetta; and at length grew so deeply enamoured that he asked her in marriage.” Reluctant to stop reading altogether, I brought the book into the kitchen with me and placed it, pages splayed down, on the table. My father had become enamored of my mother at a wake. They met south of Washington Square Park at Parrazzo’s Funeral Home, where the southern Italians of Greenwich Village held their wakes. Blonde, fair, with high cheekbones, my mother had a serenity in her hazel eyes that made you want to know more about her. My father had slicked back auburn hair, an aquiline nose, and a wide-open smile.
My father always said, “Your mother and I met at a wake and it’s been one long funeral ever since.”
“He has a sense of humor, your father,” my mother would add.
My mother, who strained against her own confusions with two identities, served mashed potatoes almost every night. She bought the story, prevalent at the time, that Italian cooking wasn’t healthy. She educated herself in American cooking ways as best she could, writing to Metropolitan Life Insurance for their cookbooks of healthy American recipes which their actuaries, no doubt, determined would make you live longer and their company more profitable. Along with mashed potatoes with—by my mother’s lights—their nourishing milk and gobs of butter, we most often had steak, which was my father’s alimentary paradise, like the Cuccagna-land Italian peasants dreamt of, where it rained ravioli and macaroni rolled down mountains of cheese. When the mood hit her, my mother made upside-down cake, its brown sugar syrupy and glistening against the yellow pineapple.
“What’s it mean,” I asked, moving Cellini’s autobiography out of the way so no food would smudge it, “that Nana has to register?”
“Shush,” my mother hissed. “We don’t want anyone to know.” She took the steak and Swiss chard, along with the fixings for salad, out of the refrigerator. Looking straight at me, she stood rigid for a moment, holding the food tight against her chest, her face stony and white. “It’s something we don’t talk about … don’t say anything to anybody,” my mother cautioned. The walls of the long narrow kitchen seemed to be closing in on her and me.
My father pulled me to his side and hugged me. “It just means that people who aren’t citizens have to let the government know they’re here.” My head shot backward: it had never occurred to me that my grandmother wasn’t a citizen. I couldn’t move, however, from non-citizen to alien with its echoes of menace and strangeness.
Each of my parents had a different way about them. Though my father could barely string together two sentences in Italian while my mother was bilingual, and whereas my father loved steak while my mother loved garlic and oil on her scarole, my father was not at odds about his identity. He solved his duality by retaining his Italian roots but living materially like an American: he took my mother to Bermuda for their honeymoon. Photos show them both nattily dressed, relaxed, confident. My father’s business success made him an American and gave him entrée into an American lifestyle. For him it was as simple as that. Although my mother shared this lifestyle, she pursued an elusive American acceptance. It was my father who was comfortable enough with who he was to want to move to Riverdale and my mother who refused to leave her neighborhood, fearing the loss of her community and not fitting into the new one.
My father was expressive and open. I rarely asked my mother about her past. She equated her poor immigrant beginnings with inferiority
and she sometimes enhanced details to make her family—and herself—look better off than they were. Such embellishments made me distrust a lot of what my mother said. They went against what I knew in my bones, beyond language. My father, with similar beginnings, told us heartrending stories of his poverty: how a man in a bowler hat came upon him, at around age five, crying on a stoop because his hands were frozen from having no woolen gloves and the man “threw me two bits.” What did that man with his bowler and quarter represent to my father? Was it this coming together of clothing, money, and warmth that began his self-definition?
Another story involved his working as a delivery boy for six months. “The boss fires you after that,” he’d tell us, “ ’cause he’d have to give you a two-bits raise—a week. One day I was riding on the subway delivering the guy’s brooms, brushes, pails—so many, I had to pile them on my back. A guy on the train said to me, ‘What’s the matter, kid? The horse die?’ ” Now that he had his own business, he could laugh heartily, a note of triumph in its ring mixing with suppressed tears.
I dropped the potatoes into the boiling water. As the water sputtered, I began to think about all those nameless immigrants and their descendants. I had learned a lot about the immigrants’ day-to-day lives from overhearing conversations as my mother gossiped with acquaintances while I accompanied her on errands. Like their work stringing tags, a thousand for twenty cents, a whole family gathered around the table after supper, slipping a short piece of knotted string through a hole in a price tag, then looping the string into another knot. Workers in a dress store attached the tags to the garments and wrote the price. Or the 10,000 hard candies the women wrapped in cellophane each day at the candy factory, day in and day out.
My mother created a kind of American fairy tale about herself. But in her own uncertainty, she created not one, but many identities. One of the many names my mother gave herself to become American was Maggie. I could tell when someone had met my mother and their relationship by how they addressed her: Peggie for early school friends, Maggie for those she met through work, Margie for her later friends, Margaret for her family, and in the neighborhood itself they referred to her as Mary Pickford because she looked like the silent film star. Nicknaming was common in our neighborhood: Fat Louise, Skags, Frank Ketchem-up. “Michelina Guerrieri,” my mother used to say. “I wanted to die, to hide under my desk and never come out when the teacher called my name for the roll at school.”
Once when I was five, right before Christmas, I was playing in the little park by St. Anthony’s Church that my grandmother had taken me to. Impinging on the play space, an elevated crèche was filled not only with life-size statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, but also half a dozen sheep and cows as well as the three Wise Men and their camels and a gang of angels and shepherds. We kids, nonetheless, raced around in the diminished space. While I caught my breath from one of the recent contests we had devised—whoever ran the length fastest from the farthermost cow on one end to the shepherd on the other won—the other children’s father approached me and asked, “Are you Mary Pigfoot’s daughter?” His handsome face, cocked to the side, smiled down at me.
“Yes,” I answered, gulping for air. I knew my mother was known by some such name, though I knew nothing about the film actress.
“I’ve known your mother since she was your age,” he added with a tinge of wistfulness.
Being known as Mary Pickford must have been the greatest fairy tale of all for my mother to live in. Mary Pickford, I later learned, was not just a movie star—that should have been enough to affirm my mother’s being fully American—but was America’s Sweetheart. Her every move was photographed and reported upon. Even after she divorced Douglas Fairbanks and married Buddy Rogers, that didn’t displace her from the hearts of America.
My mother’s resemblance to Mary Pickford went beyond the neighborhood. When we ate out on Sundays—we habitually frequented Schmidt’s Farm Restaurant somewhere in Westchester County, where my brother and I always ordered the turkey dinner—the waiter for that Sunday always asked if my mother was Mary Pickford. My father, afterward, would say to us kids, “Do I look like Buddy Rogers?” But he chuckled from this attention his wife had received.
My mother’s sweet smile made you forget she was ambitious. Before she was married, she was the first Italian hired as a secretary by Reo Cars uptown. She spent her improved salary—she had worked in the candy factory on Eighth Street for two years while attending secretarial school at night—on watercolors at the annual art exhibit in Washington Square Park; a little fox stole, the kind that was all heads, beady eyes, and paws; tickets for the theater and musicals; and vacations when she rode horses.
As the light outside the kitchen waned, I continued to read Cellini’s autobiography, now in a more desultory way. I looked up from my book when I heard my grandmother shut the front door. She had just returned from picking up a bottle of milk for tomorrow’s breakfast at the dark, narrow store around the corner, run by a poor woman with elephantiasis, whom my grandmother patronized as often as possible, stopping to gossip in Italian. I watched as Nana removed the bottle from her dark cloth shopping bag. Before placing the bottle in the refrigerator, she shook it to mix the milk and the cream, clotted on the inside of the cardboard top.
Now in her straight-backed chair by the window, Nana fingered her rosary. She spent a lot of time praying at home or in St. Anthony’s dark, lower church with its flickering candles in their red glass containers and six life-size statues on either side of the altar. Though my grandmother lived in America, she was, unlike my mother or me, untouched by it. I now realized that she could have just as easily been living in China, so little was she involved with America’s larger rhythm: she lived in our Italian neighborhood, she spoke only Italian, she rarely exposed herself to anything but her Italian way of life.
Now she looked at neighbors returning from work or hurrying back from a last errand of the day. On the roof across the street, the man who trained pigeons to fly in formation locked them in their cages for the night. A sliver of moon rose above the bricks and cages and stars shone, luminous, in the darkening sky while the Swiss chard my mother was cooking in oil and garlic sputtered along with its fragrant vapors.
I stayed in the kitchen, thumbing through the Cellini autobiography, reading about his grandfather’s saving Benvenuto, at age five, when he clutched a scorpion in his hand. And then the next time I read about his grandfather, it was for his funeral. I heard the steam hiss and watched it sneak out through the cover on the pot of potatoes.
How terrible, I thought, to lose someone you love so much. I slipped into the living room to look at my grandmother sitting quietly by the window and couldn’t imagine life without her. I hoped this alien registration business would bring her no harm and that it would quickly become a story she would turn into a comedy as she often did with the little tragedies that beset her in America.
I checked on the potatoes, poking them with a fork. When my grandmother and I spent time together, there was quiet and calm. We made things and lived out who we were in the making. She and I often spent our time together with her showing me how to knit or how to fry zeppoli. Or I watched her drain the spaghetti, adding watered-down ricotta to it and sprinkling that with Romano cheese and black pepper for lunch. She prepared a little bowl for me, urging, “Provala, provala”—Try it, try it—pleased as I slurped up each silky strand. At dinner, I watched her ladle spirals of my favorite, strindini, whose curlicue shape delighted me, into my portion of chicken soup. Now as I stood by the kitchen door watching her, her black rosary beads clicked in a regular rhythm, soothing my soul; her Ave Marias whispered in our quiet house. Only my mother, her dark green apron tied loosely at the waist, chopping the Swiss chard in the kitchen, and my father turning the pages of the World Telegram broke the silence.
The next day was Saturday. As I dressed for my friend Martha’s twelfth birthday party, I fretted about my grandmother’s alien status. But Martha’s party that
afternoon on Washington Square North helped me forget about it for most of the day. Away from my mother, I knew who I was. When I returned home, my mother gave me another reason to fret, but it wasn’t about my grandmother’s alien status.
“So what was their brownstone like?” my mother asked.
Every time I went to one of my American friends’ homes for the first time, I had to report back to my mother about what their apartment looked like, what condition the furniture was in, and what kind of a housekeeper my friend’s mother was. Martha’s living room was large and square with high ceilings and tall windows overlooking the park. Sparsely furnished, the space was dominated by a dusty baby grand piano. The piano bench and a few wooden chairs were the only other furniture to speak of.
My mother chortled in disbelief when I finished my report on Martha’s home. “They didn’t have any furniture in the room?” my mother continued. “And no rug? Just the bare wood floor? Was it polished at least?”
It gave my mother such joy to hear that most of my American friends’ mothers were not as good housekeepers as she that I’d add colorful details about these women, to enhance my mother’s gloating. She particularly loved hearing about Sheila’s mother’s unproductive attempts to keep their Tenth Street brownstone with its worn furniture clean against the onslaught of three rambunctious boys. The tired furniture and Sheila’s mother in an unkempt housedress evened out the equation of my mother’s being Italian. And thus she established herself at the head of her self-created hierarchy.
“No, it was sort of scratched up and dusty like the piano—well, not as much dust as the piano …” I trailed off. These offerings to my mother made me miserable with disloyalty to Martha and her family, whom I admired and who brought me into a world of art. We girls at the party—my classmates at St. Joseph Academy: Judy, Tonya, Sandra, Joan, and I—had a lot of fun. Her mother played the piano and we all stood around and sang songs and her father was so nice … he laughed a lot and joked with each one of us, making us feel special.