by Lee Gutkind
Martha’s father was a modern artist. A few weeks before, Martha and I had been allowed to take the Fifth Avenue bus by ourselves uptown to the Museum of Natural History. As the red bus lumbered along the congested street, we talked about art. She told me, “Modern art represents something about the thing you’re painting.”
“What d’you mean? Give me an example.”
“Well, say the artist puts in a lot of seashells like the ones we saw at the museum. It might mean he’s feeling free like he’s on vacation at the beach or maybe if he puts cat’s eyes in a painting, he’s saying something about the character of the person, like they’re catlike in their walk or stealthy. Something like that.”
“Hm-m, I see what you mean. Is that the kind of painting your father does?”
“Sort of.”
All my American friends lived north of Washington Square Park. My one Italian friend lived, like me, south of the park, as most of the Italians did. The park acted a bit like a Mason-Dixon line, those north living and believing one thing, those south another. And there was some merit to each of them and some falseness and rigidity. The park sometimes acted as a bridge for me between these two worlds and sometimes as a moat that separated one part of me from the other.
I liked both ways of living and believing. At home I spoke Italian with my grandmother, played “Santa Lucia” on the piano, and read about Italian artists. With my friends’ families, I sang “Turkey in the Straw,” discussed art, made amateur movies with my father’s eight-millimeter movie camera, and went to museums. From Martha’s family I learned about modern art, and I liked Tonya, who was creative in her writing like her father, a children’s author. I marveled at the courage of Judy and her parents, who escaped from Nazi Germany, first fleeing to England, then gaining entry into America. They were people from a larger world than mine. I viewed my journey in America as one toward this larger world.
In my own small, intimate country there was the warmth of my relatives, and having my aunt and godmother and my married cousin nearby, and eating all our special foods, and having my grandmother live with us, and hearing her speak in Italian, and listening to opera, and having all the storekeepers know us by name. My mother’s immaculate house, with her artwork on the walls, her Oriental rug in the living room, and her piano in its alcove, was central to her world, where we lived in the complicated certainties and confusions of her making.
She believed that a beautiful and clean house was the most important thing after feeding her family a balanced meal à la the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company recipes. These were things she had not experienced growing up. She was happily scandalized when I told her that Sandra’s mother read while I played at her house in the One Fifth Avenue residential hotel where they lived and that she ordered a lunch—a creamed chicken dish with toast points—from the hotel for us girls at Sandra’s birthday party.
Late afternoon of the following Saturday we started off on our weekly errands. As we left the store of Virginia, the owly eyed delicatessen owner with the silky falsetto voice that broke into trilling laughter, my mother told me about the fattura, the potion-maker from the Lower East Side who had clients in all the Italian neighborhoods, she was so good. I finished chewing the paper-thin slice of Genoa salami that Virginia had given me. My mother told me the fattura was able to put her son through law school on her earnings. This Italian world wasn’t completely strange and alien to my mother! It was useful in bringing an American living to a fattura’s son.
“Once,” my mother said, “my cousin Mary in White Plains went to her. Mary’s husband Frank was very sick. They were newlyweds. He was almost dying because the blood was constricting in his veins. Mary told the woman how worried she was about Frank … Mary thought the girl Frank jilted to marry her had put the evil eye on him. So the fattura gave her a potion to put in his coffee and told her not to worry … and that Frank loved her and he’d get better—and he did. That woman was very powerful.”
I asked my mother if she really believed that the woman cured him.
“Oh yes,” she assured me, “that woman was powerful—not like the ones today. Your grandmother isn’t as powerful as she was. Nana can’t set bones like that woman from the Lower East Side—”
“Is Nana going to register as an alien?” I interrupted, unable to keep quiet any longer about what was on my mind.
“Yes, it’s the law,” my mother sighed. Then she continued her train of thought, not lingering on this subject she found so filled with shame—vergogna, as my grandmother said, a word that sounded so much more like the feeling my mother held buried within her. I took some deep breaths, my chest expanding in short, quick bursts.
“The women of today,” she continued, clearing her throat, “the fatturas, aren’t as good as the old ones.” She was as firm in this belief as she was that mashed potatoes every night were good for her family. My mother would stay in this world, nestled in her immigrant neighborhood, while I would eventually venture beyond the bookshelves in our living room.
If one part of my mother invented herself as an American, another part of her was still deeply attached to the ideas of my grandmother’s world. Despite my mother’s efforts to be American, the Italian-pagan ethos of my grandmother exerted an unconscious pull on her. My mother held firmly to certain beliefs: you should eat American food, keep a perfect house, educate your children. Your daughter should accompany you on your errands to learn how to do things.
We continued our shopping, stopping at Jimmy the Butcher’s. When we entered, the sawdust on the white and black tiled floor hushed our footsteps. Each of the three Pacelli brothers, all with their thick black hair and black eyes, stood behind his own butcher block. They wore white aprons flecked with spots of blood. Each butcher had his own set of customers and, even if one of his brothers was very busy, the other brothers would never wait on a customer not their own. My mother used Jimmy.
“He was good to me during the war,” she told me, which meant that he saved meat for her when shortages occurred. “Sometimes he even sold me meat when I didn’t have any ration stamps left.” The last statement hung in the air, the silence reverent with my mother’s thanksgiving: she still frequented Jimmy’s store despite the new Grand Union around the corner.
I angled my way in front of the customers who lounged on the chairs’ wooden seats with curved-wire backrests while others stood, waiting their turn. I snaked past Palma with her black cloth shopping bag, frilly leaves of celery spilling over, to watch the gleaming knives speed across the fatty edging of lamb chops or slice across a flattened piece of calf’s liver, dark as blood, soft and slippery as silk.
Jimmy, the shortest and oldest of the three brothers, pushed his head forward from his neck and hunched shoulders, like a turtle poking its head out of its shell. He recognized us with a quick nod and a slight upturn of his mouth, his piercing black eyes blinking nervously. After whacking bone and meat with his cleaver, he trimmed the pork chop. He swept the scraps of fat and bone off his block with one quick motion, wrapped the meat, grabbed a black crayon, and marked the price in large, careless numbers.
“Hello, Margie,” Jimmy breathed, his eyes darting up from below his black eyebrows. He looked down quickly. “What can I get you today?”
“How are you, Jimmy? I’d like some braciola. A pound will do, half a pound of chuck steak, and a roast of beef—about three pounds.”
On Sundays we ate Italian—mostly: my mother and grandmother prepared the sauce, rolled the braciola with garlic and parsley, formed the meatballs, fried the sausage, stuffed the artichokes, mixed the salad—and my mother cooked roast beef. But no mashed potatoes were made that day.
With smooth, elegant motions, Jimmy cut the beef into thin slices for the braciola. When he reached for the chuck, my mother added, “I’d like it ground, please.” I watched as he put it in the meat grinder, the beef squeezing out in long pink strips dotted with bits of white, first coming straight out, then flopping over like so many useless
puppets. Jimmy swiped at the holes when the grinder stopped extruding beef, gathered the strands into a ball, and laid it on the paper. Then he readied the roast.
“Thanks, Jimmy. That’ll be all for today.”
Dusk was falling quickly. We walked toward MacDougal Street and passed the pork store where, hanging in the window, fatty, short salamis glistened next to lean, long ones. The slightly vinegary odor of the cheese store wafted our way before we passed by, its round scamorze, hanging next to the cacciocavallo, caught up in a little knob of cheese on top. In its window, the coffee store displayed the map of Italy’s boot, made out of the beans it sold freshly ground. The fruit and vegetable men moved silently, covering for the night their produce, which they displayed on sidewalk stands while the Raffettos locked the door of their ravioli store. Then came the barn where the police horses used to be boarded, the air there still pungent. We passed the poultry store, but didn’t go in. The chickens, tight in their crates, were quiet now. The early evening air was cool. The fireflies drifted down from Washington Square to the thumbnail park on Sixth Avenue, their glow against the red brick buildings as intense as the stars on a clear night. The wind came up, licking the leaves, swirling the street debris and cloth scraps in ever faster and tighter circles, rattling the cellar door and the bakery’s window until lightning flashed and rain swept across the store fronts. We ran to our door.
Upstairs my grandmother sat hunched over her knitting in her chair by the window. My father, having shed his suit jacket, relaxed in his blue velvet chair, which my family and I always vacated when he was home. Loosening his tie, he read about the Dodgers’ chances next year—always next year—in the World Series. Cellini lay hushed in the bookcase, waiting to talk to me again from centuries past, the first of many books I would read down the years about Italy and the Italians.
CAROL BONOMO ALBRIGHT, the editor of Italian Americana, teaches Italian American Studies at Harvard University Extension School. She has published fiction, reviews, literary criticism, and journalism, and is the coauthor of Republican Ideals in the Selected Writings of Joseph Rocchietti, 1835–1845.
The Names of Horses
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
ANNIE RACHELE LANZILLOTTO
My father wants to give them all away. The men are coming over to take a look. One man will take two. The other men at least will take a look. There is no coffee in the house. My mother is leaning out the window reeling his clothes in just ahead of the rain. The clothesline squeals as she reels it. Sock by sock she unpinches and drops into the brown plastic basket on the kitchen table and the basket fills. I am feeding Blacky. He pushes the nipple of the baby bottle out with his tongue and looks for her with his mouth he looks, but days ago she slinked away, curled up in the light coming in through the screen door, curled up like days do and dust—beneath the radiator Penny lay down in that diamond cut-out of sun there patched on the floor. She had six pups two weeks ago. Every day since she’s moved less and less. Now only parts of her move. Her tail for instance slithers out of the diamond onto the cool dark floor, and her fur—when the hall door is opened, her fur lifts with the wind, and her eyes—as I feed the puppies she is too weak to feed, her eyes follow my hand to their mouths, then fall away. With the day the sunlight stretches across the floor and she, toward the back of the staircase. The stairs there lead nowhere, spiral up into the ceiling. My father had that way closed off years ago. I toss circles of meat at her, things she used to jump for. I touch salami to her tongue and it drops. I walk away. I come back. It still lies there. The sun has climbed the underside of the stairs.
My father wants to give them all away before they’re named but each I’ve named already I’ve whispered their markings into their little twitching ears: Blacky, Spotty, Whitey, Rusty, Patches, Shep. Blacky’s all black like his mother black with a white streak up the belly to the neck, and a white tip on the tail as if the tail had been dipped in paint. The others look like Bow. Bow is the shepherd dog outside the white house down the corner. They keep Bow on a chain they call a choker. Whenever anyone walks by, Bow shoots out as if the lengths of chain will never end but chains do, and Bow gets yanked back up into a twisted leap and chokes. That’s why they call that chain a choker. I count on that chain for my life I count the years I count the links I count the rust, one day that chain is gonna break and Bow will fly right out over that little white wall two cinderblocks high and land dead in the middle of our street just as Greengrass in his white hot rod is burning rubber round the corner onto St. Raymond’s from Zerega the way he does without looking. We live on a one-way street named after a saint. This is the Bronx. You learn your lessons early. Greengrass is the neighborhood boy to be feared and Bow is the dog on the block to be feared and Bow and Greengrass fear one another. Greengrass with his terrible motor and Bow with his ears swiveling just ahead of the roar.
If he wanted to keep them he would have named them all by now. He would have given them the names of horses like he nicknamed us, taken a binder down from one of his two shelves lining the kitchen-long wall, spread the racing forms out over the kitchen counter and let each paw drop onto a name. “You name what you keep. You keep what you name,” he says sitting at the kitchen table, sturdy maple and oval, where he carves circles and arrows, numbers and underlines through his loose-leaf paper with pencils the size of his cigarette butts, resharpening the lead tips with a steak knife.
The houses are almost touching. The alleyways are thin and filled with argument. The backyards are crisscrossed with laundry from second and third story windows. My mother’s clothesline is the grandest on the block, spanning our cement yard from her second story window out over my basketball court way out to the pipe my father rigged atop the roof of his garage. At night her clothesline swings empty in the moon wind until morning when it begins its daily rounds from window pulley to garage pulley, her world to his world all over again.
My father comes and goes at all hours. He is The Heatman, known as the only serviceman willing to go anywhere in the Bronx and Harlem at any hour whenever a boiler breaks and the people need heat. He keeps a cut-off lead pipe the size of a baseball bat under the driver’s seat of his van. For service calls he carries the pipe in one hand and his toolbox in the other. I’ve heard stories of him using both. His hours are unpredictable. He can come back home at any time. I know when my father is home by the opening screech of the gate. The front gate he kicks in the wire gut like a dog. His entrance is recorded in a scar whitening the cement by each entering sweep of the gate. The screech of the gate is louder than the squeal of her clothesline. A simple cry of friction sending squirrels into trapeze feats leaving branches in their wake. The puppies all huddle in their box. An arc scratched for good in the sidewalk.
He pulls his van up the lip of the driveway and throws it in park just beneath her window, “CAW-FEE!” This time she ignores him. This time there is none, and she knows he knows there is no more. This morning he wouldn’t give her a nickel, “No, not fi-cents,” he’d said on his way out to work, afraid she’d go to Frank-n-Joe’s, where Frank or Joe or even Li’l Joey might squeeze her hand as she slid the five pound bag over the counter to be ground, and slip her a thin slice of salami to tuck inside her cheek to chew on the walk home. “It don’t make sense,” my father had said, “if they went giving salami out to everybody they’d be broke in no time.”
“CAW-FEE!” he yells up at her window, almost singing. This is his salutation to her. Coffee is the main currency between them. She yanks the rope. The sun and rain come down together. She yanks the rope. The puppies huddle in their box. She yanks the rope and the basket fills. There is no coffee in the house. His shorts by the crotch she rips off the line. “CAW-FEE!” She yanks the rope. She yanks the rope. The knot catches the groove of the pulley at the far end over his garage. She pushes the rope out the other way. She yanks the sun. His shirts come down together. She yanks the rain. The green shoulders clamped to the line march in the air, their arms swingin
g, falling, swinging toward her, elbows bending. And the basket fills. “CAW-FEE!”
“You know there ain’t none,” she yanks, “there’s no milk, there’s no sugar. If you want, give me money. I’ll go to Frank-n-Joe’s. You know that.” The garage door he hoists up like a great white sail. Black gaping holes, the clean-cut lips of so many copper pipes stacked into pyramids stare out of the garage, taking aim at him from head to foot.
“Hey You!” he shoots up at her.
“I have a name!” the words spit out of her defiantly down at him. His worker Willie-boy is with him. Somehow this protects her. “I have a name!” she says again. And I hear a trumpet call.
“Hey Meatball!” he calls up at her, laughing out his mouth.
“I have a name!” Her words hang in the air, damp, with pinched corners. The drums are not far off now, and the men lifting their knees in unison. Although I’ve never seen my Daddy marching, I have seen the men he has killed in his eyes. He looks at them sometimes as if those men are standing behind my eyes. They hide in the shadows in the creases in the gray matter in my father’s brain. They come out when he tells me lullabies about a white horse on a mountain then the mountains turn to hills and he drifts off into silence and then there are explosions out the roots of trees. I avoid going to bed at all costs. Sometimes I awaken to him standing at my mother ready to strike. I stay up as late as I can every night. My father and I play poker with circular chips he cut carefully with giant silver scissors from the labels of Gold Medal quart milk cartons. We play until eleven o’clock, then we watch the evening news and I fall asleep, but I get up again at one-thirty and we watch “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Twilight Zone” and the tension in my body is matched by these stories. In one episode a prop-plane with red markings on its wings crash-lands into a house, ripping in through the living room walls and landing next to the couch; the woman living there has a past connection with the pilot, he’s been lost since the war, and she’s been waiting. This is the episode I want to replay night after night: the lost soldier who crashes into the living room, bringing his war right to the couch. I see my father as a young marine my father is circling overhead my father can demolish the plasterboard that surrounds our rooms at any moment now. As I sit facing the television set I run my fingers in the patterned terrain of our sea blue living room rug, I see my father in Okinawa and Guadalcanal in that sea blue. The walls can split any time now.