Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  The small Connecticut town my twin and I grew up in was called Bethel. Think of Mayberry, RFD, television’s version of Anytown, U.S.A. There was a brick town hall with an ice-cold water fountain and, next door, a greasy spoon named the Doughboy, after the lichen-colored statue on the town green. There were two barber shops, Patsy’s and Chris’s, each with a revolving candy-striped pole. At Mulhaney’s variety store for a dime you could buy a fudgesicle or creamsicle from the freezer case, which opened to exhale a cloud of frost in your face. Add the dreary ruins of a halfdozen abandoned hat factories, their cold brick smokestacks upthrust into the low New England sky, and voilà: my hometown.

  When my parents moved to Bethel in 1957, Bethel had a population of just under 8,000. Though some residents commuted to New York City—two hours away by train—most worked in the local factories and stores. My father was an exception. He was an inventor, his laboratory a crumbling stucco shack at the bottom of our driveway, which rose up a steep incline after passing under the swaying manes of six huge willow trees. Everyone in my family called it The Building, as if it were the only standing structure in the world, let alone in Bethel, Connecticut.

  I loved to visit my father there. After school I’d jump off the bus, charge under the willow trees, and knock timidly on his door. I’d find Papa working in a cloud of dust at his typewriter, or at the drafting table, or wiring a circuit, smoke from his soldering gun rising in arabesques up into the blinking fluorescent lights. If especially lucky I’d find him behind the lathe, the metal-darkened fingers of one hand curved over the smoothness of the spinning chuck, his other hand manipulating an array of dials and levers, like the engineer of a locomotive, guiding the bit that sliced through metal, spewing out steamy turnings—“curlicues” George and I called them—of aluminum, copper, and brass.

  This was my father whom I would not have traded for all the fathers in the world. Though he was born in Milan, you would never have guessed it, since he spoke better English than Walter Cronkite, albeit with a faintly British accent—mid-Atlantic, someone once called it, conjuring an island-sized nation halfway between Europe and here, with its own flag and customs. Its chief export commodity: eccentric fathers.

  My father’s was no ordinary immigrant’s trajectory. He first came to the States at the height of the Great Depression, in the mid-thirties, when he was twenty-two, having spent many youthful summers in England, where he embraced that country’s culture and language. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering at Harvard, then took a job with what was then the Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C. On a trip to Italy he met my future mother. A flurry of romantic letters across the Atlantic led to their engagement and to a provincial Italian girl’s brave migration to a new world with all its uncertainties.

  My parents struggled. Though my father’s secure government post could easily have led to a cushy job with Westinghouse, Sylvania, or IBM, instead he quit to go it alone as an inventor, freelance. With our pregnant mother he set out in search of a house within traveling distance of New York, one with an outlying structure my father could convert to a laboratory. Less than a year later, with my brother and me just a few months old, they relocated to Bethel. To my knowledge they were the first Italian immigrants ever to have done so.

  I’ve painted a picture of the town. Now I’ll paint one of my parents. Another ’60s TV show comes to mind. In Green Acres, a white-haired Eddie Albert played a patrician and pompous corporate executive turned gentleman farmer, with Hungarian actress Eva Gabor as his thick-accented, dimwitted, Park Avenue-via-Budapest wife.

  My father was no gentleman farmer, but technically he did work on a farm. In its previous incarnation The Building had been a black market farm, selling poultry, eggs, butter, and other contraband items rationed during World War II. And no, Mom wasn’t Hungarian, or dimwitted, but her northern Italian good looks were every bit as stunning as Eva Gabor’s, and her accent was as thick and pungent as the Genoa salamis Papa brought home from Manganaro’s Italian import store on Eighth Avenue.

  And like Eva Gabor, Mom was a fountain of glamour and flirtation. She smiled for the paparazzi in her head, and seeded just about every male who’d venture into the bridal boutique where she worked with a heart-throbbing crush. She married my father because (she claimed) he looked like Charles Boyer. But her Charles Boyer turned out to be something of a slob, a man who wore the same ratty sweater and stained pants day in and out, with his zipper yawning half the time. Papa was as oblivious of appearances as my mother was concerned with them. Mentally she still lived in the land of bruta figura, where appearances were, if not everything, close to it. She and my father were oil and water. He was pedantic, rational; Mom was dramatic, emotive. Mom was all instinct and innuendo, Papa all logic and intellect. That he was fifteen years older and twice divorced only added to the disparity. Occasionally, in the midst of one of their perpetual clashes, George and I would turn each other and mouth the words “Green Acres.”

  In a town like Bethel it didn’t take much to stand out. That our parents were foreigners helped, but that was just one of their eccentricities. As I’ve said, our mother was ravishing, a combination Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani, with Magnani’s long nose and burning eyes and Loren’s sculpted Egyptian lips. She was far and away the most exotic and alluring woman in the town, which might have been cause for envy and the malice that usually goes with it, had her foreignness not exempted her from the grind of Bethel’s vicious rumor mill. Thanks to that accent Mom could get away with almost anything, including being glamorous in a town where glamour was as alien as a bottle of Strega or an Alfa Romeo. Both sexes were drawn equally to her. UPS drivers spun off their routes to drop by and visit her. Like sharks smelling blood my schoolmates circled her, gathering round the black Chambers stove in her kitchen where, while stirring up a batch of Bolognese, she’d regale them with tales of Tripoli, Libya, where she was born, and where she’d zoomed around town on the back of her crazy brother’s Lambretta, and plucked ripe figs and dates off palm trees, and had a pet monkey.

  And though in many ways her opposite, still, my father was no less attractive to my pals. Sometimes he’d hire them to work with me in his laboratory. We’d sit side by side at a bench in The Building, me and one of the neighborhood kids, sorting nuts and screws from a big cardboard box. In the background my father’s radio played—static, mainly. Smells of orange rind, solder smoke, and flatulence perfumed the dusty air. Every so often my father would let fly a dithering curse or a thunderous fart. My friends got a huge kick out of Papa’s farts and curses, his explosive fucks and dammits and shits, his trumpet-herald flatus; their faces would turn red as they’d tear with laughter. They loved Papa’s gadgets too, his Color Coders and his Mercury Switches, his Rotorless Motors and Thickness Gauges. They couldn’t get over the fact that he was an inventor, like Thomas Edison. Like Henry Ford. Like Leonardo da Vinci.

  Until I was twelve, being the son of Italians was all sugo (gravy). I assumed that all of these fine eccentricities were part and parcel of my parents’ being Italian. I pitied the other kids, who had nothing to compare. Their fathers wore dull suits and worked dull factory and office jobs. Their moms cooked ravioli from cans with bloated winking chefs on the labels. They failed to grasp that real Italian dressing came out of two bottles, one called oil (olive) and another called vinegar (red wine), and not from a single pear-shaped bottle labeled Kraft or Wishbone. While we were weaned on watered-down vino rosso they drink Kool Aid and cow’s milk with dinner, which they called “supper” and which they ate at an absurdly early hour—six o’clock—and which featured such ghastly items as raw cucumbers and radishes (for not having to eat radishes alone I’d have cherished my Italian upbringing).

  When it came to food, I counted myself blessed. It tugged at my heart to see my friends’ mothers turning can openers on tins of Dinty Moore stew or Campbell’s Cream of Cheddar Cheese soup: supper. Not that my brother and I minded that sort of fare; in fact we welcomed the rare diversion o
f hot dogs and baked beans or corned beef (though at bean casseroles I drew the line). Still, my friends had to eat this crap regularly, except, that is, when they’d come to my house for dinner, in which case they would be treated to mom’s spinach lasagna drooping with mozzarella and/or drowning in béchamel sauce, chicken cacciatore or risotto ala Milanese, thin-pounded cutlets of veal coated with flour and fried lightly in olive oil, sprinkled with parsley and served with sunny yellow lemon wedges. For dessert: a crostata marmalata (jam pie), ornamented with a filigree of sweet buttery crust, and mom’s glorious tiramisu, or—better still—her zabaglione, soaked with enough marsala to intoxicate an army, as if Mom’s looks weren’t intoxicating enough.

  But the most intoxicating part of dinner was the conversation, if you could call it that: the endless jokes, puns, insults, and arguments that flew around the dining room table, with no one spared. Guests had a choice: they could join the melee or sit there and take it.

  For the Rowlands, the parents of my best friend Chris, it was too much. While at their dinner table the closest thing to a conversation was “pass the butter,” at ours “Shut up!” and “Fuck you!” made as many crossings as the Queens Mary and Elizabeth. One advantage of having an Italian mother: we could swear to our hearts’ content, provided we did so in English. Our father, who loved to shock the puritanical and fainthearted, would tell terrible jokes, off-color ones usually, the more embarrassing the better. Once, having delivered himself of a real stinker, my brother and I simultaneously burst out with a loud, “Pig!” Dinner over, the scandalized Rowlands cornered our mother in the kitchen and said to her, “How can you let your children speak that way—to their own father!” To which she replied that we always called our father “pig,” that it was a term of endearment, that each of us had his or her animal moniker: George, who loved the water, was “fish,” I, with eyes too big for my skull, was “tarsier,” Mom (for no apparent reason) was “monkey,” while Papa, less opaquely, was “pig.” This explanation didn’t satisfy the Rowlands, who never accepted another dinner invitation from us.

  Was the Selgins’ outrageous dinner banter likewise a product of Italy? Was my father’s tasteless ribald humor as much the fruit of his nationality as our mother’s good looks and succulent cooking? If so, all the more reason to embrace my origins.

  But there were other reasons, like growing up in a house filled with books and paintings, mostly my father’s. Like his hero, Winston Churchill, my father was a Sunday painter, and a good one, too. His oils covered the walls of our house. Those surfaces not covered with paintings were taken up by bookcases sagging under the weight of volumes in English, French, German, Italian—all the languages my polymath father spoke. And though I had barely cracked a book in English, just having all of those books around me filled me with a sense of sophistication. It was like growing up in a library, or a museum. By comparison my friends’ homes—and by extension their lives—seemed empty. True, Lenny’s WWII veteran dad had painted his bedroom ceiling with tromp l’oeil cloudy skies and dangled model Mustangs, Spitfires, and Messerschmitts in a permanent miniature dogfight. And though this had its charms, still, it lacked the snob appeal of growing up among paintings and books.

  And already by age ten or so I’d become something of a snob. Of course I didn’t see it that way. But I did believe that the Selgin family had something special, something those other all-American families in Bethel lacked. It wasn’t just that my parents were from Italy, that small, boot-shaped country across the ocean. It was something broader, deeper, something with implications greater than the curly hair on my head, the color of my eyes, the food I ate. Somehow, by virtue of who we were, the world’s boundaries and horizons were stretched wider. Our house on the hill was a little closer than other houses not only to that other country across the sea, but to the rest of the world.

  Already, though, the other side to having Italian parents—the side that wasn’t all bookshelves and béchamel sauce—had begun asserting itself. For every eccentricity that filled me with pride and delight, another caused me embarrassment and suffering.

  Take my father’s bicycle, his rusting Raleigh three-speed. Every day of his life, winter and summer, until he was well into his eighties, Papa pedaled that Raleigh to the post office and back. I can still see him now, in work-stained shorts and black kneesocks, his calf muscles as big and boxy as toasters. Sometimes he’d wear his beret, a black one speckled with multicolored lint. Often the school bus would pass him by along his route, with me and George on board, and then all the bus windows would fly open and a dozen heads would pop out shouting, “Hey, there, Mr. Magoo!” Our father would smile day-dreamily and keep pedaling. As for me, I would witness none of this display; I’d be too busy cowering in my seat, waiting for the humiliation to pass. What self-respecting dad rode a bicycle, let alone in black kneesocks?

  Just as humiliating were those trips to the swimming hole, the muddy one under the railroad trestle behind an abandoned hat factory where Bethel dads brought their kids to fish and swim. Unlike all the other dads in town, ours refused to jump into the water. Instead he would wade in ever so slowly, inch by embarrassing inch, rubbing palmfuls of brown water over his pale sagging shoulders and sunken chest, wincing and making faces like he was being tortured. Having already jumped in ourselves my brother and I would shout, “Jump, Papa, jump!” To which my father would reply, “I’m sorry, but I can’t; I’m too old.” I equated the word old with Italian, and wished my father were American. If he’d been American he would jump—like Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity.

  Papa wouldn’t throw a baseball, or a football, or any kind of ball, or a Frisbee. He “loathed” (his word) athletics. He wouldn’t watch us play baseball, never mind take us to a game, which may explain why my brother and I were so lousy at sports, and at defending ourselves, too. On a monthly basis we’d get our noses bloodied. Bobby Mullin, who went to St. Mary’s, punched our clocks regularly for being atheists, another eccentricity we picked up from our father.

  Still, though I had begun to see the drawbacks of being an immigrant son, I never saw myself as the victim of prejudice. If I didn’t fit in it was my own damned fault for having the wrong parents, or being born in the wrong country, or both. Rather than blame the neighborhood kids who taunted and teased and bloodied me—the same kids I once pitied—I started to envy them. I envied their fair straight hair and pale, squinty eyes; their skill with a baseball bat or a hockey stick; their ability to throw a pass and dribble a basketball. I envied the ease with which they blew bubbles with their gum, and whistled through their fingers, and spat between their teeth. I longed to be truly one of them—as I’d begun to see that I was not. I wanted to score their goals, hit their home runs, shoot their hoops. I longed to be a true American, to cut off my European roots and replant myself in fresh, loamy New England soil, to trade my mother’s drunken zabaglione for a thick, hearty slice of all-American apple pie.

  Paradoxically my supremely egocentric and unpatriotic Papa had long since disowned his own country. Having left Italy in his twenties, he never looked back; he left behind everything connected to his homeland: his language, his religion, his accent, even his name, which he changed from Senigaglia to Selgin, one of his less successful inventions, its supposed virtues being lack of obvious ethnicity and ease of pronunciation (in fact almost everyone gets it wrong; the “g” is supposed to be soft).

  “You are the only Selgins in the world,” our mother often reminded us. I found it hard to believe. How could there be no other Selgins? It was as hard as believing that in our huge stamp collection—two albums and an overflowing shoebox—there was not at least one one-cent magenta British Guiana stamp worth sixty thousand dollars. On my first solo trip to New York City, when I was sixteen, at the enormous library with the giant lions, I sifted through three dozen fat phone directories, intent on disproving my mother. There was indeed one other Selgin in the world, living in some dusty ghost town in New Mexico, first name Margaret. O
ne of my father’s two former wives.

  Among the few things my father didn’t leave behind in Italy was his mother. She lived with us in our house, in her own “apartment” on the ground floor. To me she was simply “Nonnie.” Though she supposedly spoke ten languages, English was not one of them. Visiting her, I would be forced to speak Italian. As an incentive she would feed me a bowl of her delicious “homemade” rice pudding, served with a tantalizing swirl of raspberry syrup and a maraschino cherry on top. In time I would discover that the rice pudding came from a can. Still, it was delicious.

  Nonnie’s apartment was its own cramped museum filled with trinkets and doilies and Japanese fans, smelling of mothballs, lilac perfume, and fried foods. She would recite to us from an ancient leather-bound volume of Dante, its pages foxed and gilded, or from the Aeneid, the syllables falling from her papery lips along with the dust from its pages. She taught me the legend of Romulus and Remus, the twins who, suckled by a she-wolf, went on to build the City of the Seven Hills. On her windowsill Nonnie kept a miniature bronze of the famous Etruscan statue. She would point to the tiny twins under it one by one and say, “Questo e Giorgio, e questo e Pierino” (This is George, and this is Peter). It tickled me to think that in a past life my brother and I had founded Rome.

  Until we finally crossed the ocean to see the real thing, our grandmother’s dusty apartment was as close as I had come to Italy. As far as I know, my brother and I were the first ten-year-olds from Bethel ever to set foot in Europe. My mother being afraid of planes, we were forced—forced!—to travel by ocean liner. Before docking in Naples, the Queen Anna Maria pulled into Lisbon, Portugal, where—my mother having worked her considerable charms—we were granted an audience with Italy’s deposed king. From Naples we rode a fast train to Rome, and a faster one to Milan, where Uncle Sergio met us. Our uncle turned out to be every bit as crazy as my mother had described him, but older and with no Lambretta. He walked with a limp and wore faded brown and gray clothes that made him look like he needed dusting.